Tonight I'm wearing one of my favorite comfy t-shirts. My sister sent it to me last year along with novelty t-shirts for the whole family. Mine has a picture of pancakes on it, which just happens to be one of my very favorite things to eat and I am fairly certain that is why it was chosen for me. It also reads, "Pancakes please!" It has that snuggly American cotton t-shirt feeling. When I put it on it kind of feels like I'm being hugged by a pancake, a thin cotton pancake with no butter or syrup.
Back when I used to work with my buddy Bruno he'd say if you're wearing a necktie all is forgiven. He said that because I often grew a scraggly beard that our boss hated. Often I looked like a vagrant. An otherwise bathed and responsible vagrant, but a vagrant nonetheless. When I wore a necktie for no reason in particular at times when I got a bit scraggly, the boss seemed to be blinded by it. She couldn't see my mustachioed face or my sideburns that were aching to connect to a ripening goatee. Bruno was right. The necktie had power. It made me different.
In an old life I was a student of theatre, of acting. One book that still sticks in my thoughts after 25 years is An Actor Prepares by Konstantin Stanislavsky. Around the same time as I was reading this I was also in a production of Hamlet that was being done in stations outdoors and I was playing the gravedigger. In the book there's a part where the character who we're supposed to be identifying with discovers the feelings that occur when you put on certain clothes or accessories. In the play I was doing, the director used various articles of clothing throughout the rehearsal process to help the actors discover new perspectives in their character's being. The things you put on affect and even change your being.
The reason this is important is because I still do this. It just occurred to me today. The undershirt thing is a part of it.
When I was sent home to work two years ago I was completely confused. Going on business trips or to the company meant work. Going to my kitchen table or later my spare bedroom-turned office was insufficient to get me into the feeling of doing my job. So I started experimenting with psychological tricks, one of them being wearing suits "to work" every day. I put on a suit and tie, grabbed my coffee and my laptop, and went and sat at my coffee table and did my job. That lasted for a bit.
It did make me feel like work was happening, but something was wrong. Looking back I know part of it is always my usual neuroses, but there's also the part where change is hard. I had a belief about the way things should be and when the ground shifted I tried to do the same things as before but on new terrain. Luckily we're humans and we're adaptable beyond our capacity to fathom it.
Also, the psychological trick I was trying to play on myself revealed flaws in my thinking, one of which was that I seemed to have thought that going to work meant I had to be uncomfortable. Of course, work is work, and discomfort is a given. Maybe. If you love what you do, your purpose, work can be physically or mentally draining, but not uncomfortable. If you love what you do, you want to be there. That's what I have come to refer to as calculated discomfort. Someone probably already coined that term, but there it is.
Yesterday when Eri pointed out to me that I've been wearing just undershirts a lot, all day, even for work, I replied "Yup!" a little too loudly for the space we were in.
Tomorrow morning I have my regular semi-weekly manager meeting. I usually wear a neatly buttoned polo shirt with the company logo on it or a shirt and tie. Tomorrow it might be "Pancakes please!" time, with my laptop camera pointed slightly higher than usual.
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