A Letter to (and from) a Maximalist

Details: hand-me-down sweatshirt, vintage Wrangler jeans, Le Tricoteur hat and Nike trainers.

It is very difficult to condense an individual's personal style into a single outfit, but I'm (fairly) sure that most people could do it. (What would yours be? Let me know in the comments!)

But what can be done for the eclectic, flaky folk that just can't settle?

It's me!

I'll tell you what can be done. We shall reinvent, refine and distill ourselves into a vast, unwieldy wardrobes that takes up half a room (or at least mine does). We cannot settle because we are never in stasis. We are different every single day. And that's absolutely A-OK.

We don't need a 'personal uniform' or a 'capsule wardrobe' because we cannot be contained in such terms. We are too (excessively) expressive and want to take up space in a world where only concise is nice and only 'small' and 'thin' and 'tiny' are acceptable extracts of the expansive dictionary we choose to ignore.

Me again! Ft. part of my crazy green and orange room!

We're not always practical: we could never pack all of our belongings into a single suitcase, but we are extravagant, daring to invert consumerist culture, to harbour collections of things that make US happy rather than buying mindlessly in an attempt to satisfy those around us. The newest phone, the 'It Bag' means nothing to us; only (in my case) 400 books by the age of 23 and a plethora of different novelty teapots will do.

At the ripe old age of whenever-I-die, I will feel triumphant to do so amongst piles of clothes I was intending to wear, next to stacks of books I never managed to finish and in a house where every art-clad wall invokes a sense of deep satisfaction that drives my affliction forward.

Details: vintage leather jacket (I got it secondhand), Monki trousers, vintage Paul Smith shirt, Miss Selfridge hat and Dr Marten shoes.

We are the maximalists. I am pleased to be one myself.

Are you?

Thank you for reading!

Instagram: @jumper.dweller

Comments

Not-Dinner-Party-Appropriate: anecdotes from the mental hospital

I feel like a time traveller. I've awoken in 2021, sleeping through a pandemic and my teenage years, now in my mid-twenties. I have no dinner-party-appropriate anecdotes. Only mental ill-health with bouts of questionable wellness. I have been in four different mental hospitals, which I predict could be four more than most people. No one talks about it, including me. Like, at all. Whenever someone talks about mental illness, there is this most impenetrable silence, followed by: 'I knew someone who was depressed once.' Or a casual, almost nonchalant change of subject. I mean, we talk about mental health a lot - how to keep it afloat, how to do 'self-care' in a commercially-assisted sense. It's all body butters and face masks. I don't like it when people reduce preventing mental illness down to looking after yourself or not. That is a large part of it, a whole team of people looked after me at my worst. Most things cannot be made better with a face mask. It...

Imposters: a story about a Capgras delusion

It's cold. I'm always so cold. My hands quiver blue and wrists bloom purple, after days of bang, bang, banging my wrist on the arm of my chair. I don't think I'm okay, but I don't think I'm not okay either. I think, I think, I think I'm breaking. I am on the children's ward. I have not seen my real parents for months. Some strange people visit sometimes. I hide from them. They are not my parents. They are often nice and I begin to trust them, then they'll do something off-kilter and I shy away again, like a beaten dog. I had climbed out of a window, bawled through the lane outside the house and taken solace at a friend's home up the road. Gently I was led back to my childhood home and bundled into the car, driven to the hospital and admitted in hopes of finding a way to avoid another inpatient admission. We couldn't find one. I arrive at the unit, brittle. Last time I was in this position, I had a home, but now I'm adrift. My parents ...

Opulence vs. Consumerism: why things aren't (and don't have to be) entirely meaningless

I've spoken about maximalism a little bit (okay, a lot. I'm a maximalist so it would be as such!) on this blog and it's something I wanted to address quickly on this calm Sunday evening. We are just about to have an Indian takeaway, so I'll make it snappy. Minimalism can be very beneficial, but it's not the only option I'd struggled and strived to achieve some abstract goal I called minimalism: very few possessions, no attachment to physical objects but rather obsessed by a desire to move from place to place hassle-free because I own virtually nothing. This, it has dawned on me, is not always helpful. Owning close-to-nothing won't necessarily make you happy, and admittedly this is a more extreme, idealised notion of minimalism, but all the same I want to argue that possessions can be incredibly powerful because it is opulence, rather than consumerism that we need to be our mindset. Opulence is not excessive wealth or a product...

jumper dweller

Search This Blog