The Practice
The Saturday Letter, No. 1
When I was little, I dressed Barbie for her dreams.
I'd come home from school, run upstairs, throw open my closet, and dive into the big bin of dolls and outfits and accessories I'd been collecting for years.
I dressed her for the job interview. For the first date with Ken. For the wedding, and for every Malibu pool party that ever happened in my bedroom.
And every single time I dressed her for something, it came true.
On hot summer days my Grandma Rainey would show up with a bin of materials and Barbie patterns, and she'd teach my sisters and me to make doll dresses out of our mismatched frilly socks. Whatever scraps she'd been sewing with that week turned into a wardrobe the size of my hand. Tiny dresses. A coat with a real lining. A skirt with an actual waistband.
My sister Jen and I would plan Barbie sleepovers for the weekend, pooling everything we owned into one long imaginary life.
I'd lay the little clothes out on the carpet and choose the day's outfit with the seriousness of a little girl who had real decisions to make.
Everyone thought that girl was playing.
She was practicing.
I know what Barbie gets accused of, and some of it is fair. She was an impossible shape handed to a generation of us girls.
But I've gone back to that carpet a hundred times in my memory, and here's what was actually happening.
I didn't want her body. I wanted her calendar.
The interviews. The weddings. The trips. The California sun and somewhere to be. She was never my mirror. She was my rehearsal space.
And I wasn't rehearsing outfits.
Every single thing I put on that doll was a question. What if I were the woman who goes on interviews? What if I were the one somebody drives across town to pick up? What if my life had a plain old weekday in it worth dressing for?
I was trying on lives. The clothes were just how a seven-year-old ran the experiment.
Every girl did this. Maybe not with Barbie. Maybe with paper dolls, or a doll your aunt sewed for, or your own hands pulling three things out of the closet and holding them up in front of the mirror, trying to work out which one of you was going out today.
We were all rehearsing for our own lives before anybody gave us the word for it.
And then, at some point, for every single one of us, the rehearsal got interrupted.
Mine came at a dinner table, in a big Italian family, where the rule was to clean your plate and also stay small. Yesterday I told you about the peach dress I never wore. That's the house it hung in.
I'll leave it there. You have your own version and I'd bet money it's as specific as mine. A person, a year, a sentence you can still hear.
But you know what? Those interruptions, the ones where we learned that something about us needed managing before we walked out the door, didn't stop me from getting dressed. I got dressed every day for the next forty years.
It changed what I was dressing for.
I went from dressing for a life to dressing for cover. From rehearsal to defense. From who could I be? to what will they say? The little girl who dressed Barbie for her dreams learned to dress herself to disappear, and she was so good at it that nobody noticed, including her.
Today I still stand in my closet wondering why certain pieces won't let me hang them back up. There are piles marked for donation that I can't make myself carry out the door. Plenty of mornings I stay in my leggings instead of taking the five minutes to shower and put on a blouse.
And the good days live in that same closet. Same room, different morning.
I reach for color. I wear my favorite blazer on a walk. I let my power come out in my curvy jeans.
Here is what I understand now that I've done the work.
That bedroom floor was my empire.
A girl, alone, before anybody could see her, deciding who she was going to be that day. No audience. No verdict. Nobody grading it. Just her and a small pile of clothes and a question about what kind of life this was going to be.
That's the morning dress. That's why we're here, and I've invited you to it because you have your own version of that floor.
Rainey handed me the dolls and the patterns. Her mother Helen handed Rainey the appetite for a bigger life than the one she was given. I was practicing the inheritance at eleven and a half inches tall, years before I had the rooms or the words for any of it.
And the practice never actually left. It went quiet. It got buried under a dinner table and a size tag and forty years of somebody else's opinions.
It waited.
The dolls are bigger now. The dreams are clearer. And the wardrobe is finally yours.
TRY THIS ON: Today, get dressed the way you once dressed yourself or something you played with as a kid. Lay it out first. Then get dressed for yourself, head to toe.
One more thing. This first Saturday Letter is free because I could not stand for anyone to miss it. The next ones belong to paid subscribers, along with the full archive and the member chat. $8 a month, $80 for the year.
If this letter found you somewhere real, that is the door. I would love to have you inside.