Shit That I Love: My black long-sleeve thermal
I think a lot about a black long-sleeve thermal shirt that I used to have. It was probably my favorite shirt that I’ve ever owned. It was comfortable. It kept me warm. I looked pretty good when I was wearing it. But when I think about that shirt now, I think about how I came to own it and how I eventually gave it up. I think about what those things say about me.
In high school, I cheated in class all the time. I didn’t feel remotely guilty about it either. If you’d have asked me about it then I probably would have told you I was an enterprising young man. I obviously didn’t have a choice in the matter of attending school and getting to the next stage of life required decent grades. So, if anything, I should be celebrated for doing what it takes to manage those decent grades.
One day during lunch my sophomore year I realized that I had a quiz the following period that I had essentially no chance of passing by honest means. It was the type of quiz that tested basic memorization; like vocabulary or something. So I ran to the library, typed the answers in 6-point font and printed a cheat-sheet about twice the size of a fortune cookie’s fortune. This wasn’t a new trick for me, but there was one problem: Concealing a tiny cheat-sheet was much easier with a long-sleeve shirt, and it being spring, I didn’t bring a jacket. So, with the clock ticking, I went to the school’s Lost & Found and found a black long-sleeve thermal and claimed it as my own.
I passed that quiz, realized that I liked the shirt, washed it, and made it part of my life. I took it with me to college where I gave up academic cheating and became conscious of the value of education and the intrinsic satisfaction of learning something you can take with you for the rest of your life.
My girlfriend in college also loved that shirt and, adhering to a very cliché college girlfriend trope, wore it quite a bit herself while we dated. That’s how I lost it. She didn’t take it from me. I don’t think she even wanted it. The relationship was ending and a token of me was probably not something she was interested in. But I gave it to her. Not as a peace offering or a gesture of goodwill, but as a weird you’re going to feel guilty and regret this breakup move. It was the worst kind of manipulation: desperate and transparent.
I still think about that shirt quite a bit. Both the way I acquired it and the way I relinquished it would suggest that I never deserved it. That feeling isn’t necessarily guilt. It’s more of an anxiety over figuring out how to deserve anything.
I rarely feel like I deserve to be published at the places I get to write for. Who do I think I am putting my name next to the other writers who made me want to write at those places in the first place? When I work up the courage to negotiate a rate the email reads in my head as someone else’s voice. I guess it’s Imposter Syndrome, but it seeps into other parts of my life. I don’t really think I deserve to have as many amazing friends as I do, and it only seems fair that they will someday acknowledge that and move on.
But the difference between that black shirt and my career or friendships is that I’m acutely aware of how much I want to accomplish certain things in my career or how much I value my friendships. I don’t know if I deserve them, but I’m trying to deserve them. I don’t take the lucky breaks for granted, anymore.
The cheating I did in high school was a monumental waste, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy catching up on the deeper education I was denying myself. It’s pretty clear to me that my college girlfriend and I weren’t a good match to stay together — we weren’t particularly nice to each other in the third year of our three-year relationship — but I don’t know if I’d be the same person without having known her, and that’s a weird bow to put on a relationship years after it ended. But I think it’s a good bow.
Wanting something and deserving it aren’t the same thing, but I think you need to want something to figure out how to deserve it.
I still miss that shirt. Other thermals don’t fit quite as well, don’t look quite as good on me. It was a very normal shirt. But it helped me start to learn how to appreciate the things I don’t deserve.
