There are so many beautiful things about growing up. Growing taller, figuring out who you are, always coming up with new dreams and unreachable goals for the future, and outgrowing past goals - whether you reached them or forgot about them over time. Something that once seemed so important, and so exciting can easily become something you barely even remember less than a year later. It almost seems silly that I used to think about certain things, places, or people so much. Especially now, I couldn’t even picture most of those things anymore. A once thriving coffee shop that I spent every Wednesday night at for years has become nothing but an empty shell now, inaccessible to the people who grew up or fell in love there. This was the first shirt I placed into the donation box. The beloved, once priceless to me shirt that I was gifted by an employee. 

I used to get made fun of for being so in love with this building, this plain and rundown coffee shop that was losing more money than it was making each week. But this was the place I made friends for the first time that wasn’t a cousin, or my brother’s friends. It was the place I picked up a guitar and played for the first time, and it was where I could go and always feel at home. So why was I placing this shirt that was threaded with memories, and still reeking of coffee into the box? It was simple. It was 8 years ago. It represented something that molded me into who I was, but this shirt itself only hung in my closet as a reminder that this part of my life had ended. I based my life around the sadness I felt for this place for years. Why would I keep it, and remind myself of a time when I was so broken, and felt so alone? I’d always have the memories of playing music there with my friends, and doing things we shouldn’t have done out on the back patio, and the late nights where we would just sit on the couches and laugh about absolutely nothing. Tomorrow this shirt would be gone from my possession, but it wouldn’t erase any of the formative memories I had in that place. It was time to stop giving power to things that had none. 

The next shirt into the box was the first high school spirit shirt I bought. It wasn’t purchased in a school store with classmates around me. I didn’t have the sound of other girls giggling and the clicks of the phone cameras while they took selfies in their new shirts. Mine came from a thrift store the week before school began. The sounds around me were the store speaker reciting the daily deals.

“All blue tag items are half off today! Gray tags are priced at $1.49, and pink tagged furniture will be buy one get one half off - today only! Thank you for shopping with us.”

My parents worked hard for everything we had, but in this city, I had to fight too. I was one of ten students on full academic scholarship going into my freshman year. It was empowering to be gifted enough for a scholarship at all, but it means that ten of us would be testing in a separate room from other kids for finals. We could buy shirts from thrift stores and pretend that they came from the school shop, pretend that we got them for $25 instead of $1.49, and we could try our hardest to fit in with kids from generational wealth. But the bottom line was, we would always be separated at the end of each year, we would always be wearing spirit wear that was a year or two older than theirs, and somehow they would always be able to tell that we didn’t come from what they did. I wasn’t able to buy new school sweaters and team shirts when they passed the sign up sheets around the room in the first class of the day. I rented instruments for music class, and brought my mom’s painting set to art class. No matter what it was though, there were always looks from other classmates. Looks and whispers. Group chats and screenshots. This shirt meant everything to me when I bought it. I was so smart to have been awarded a full academic scholarship to a prestigious private school. But it reminded me that I had never felt welcomed there, and I didn’t have the funds to buy my classmate’s approval. Into the box it went, this one followed by a smile. 

Some things are less about how they looked, or what business logo they had on them. This one was a tye-dyed shirt from some kind of driving school. This one came from somebody I don’t even remember. And this isn’t one of those situations where you try hard to forget somebody because they’re awful, it was just from a chaotic time in my ignorant youth. When I say that I loved this shirt though, I mean I REALLY loved this shirt. It was one of those tye-dye shirts that clearly felt used and soft, but the colors were so vibrant still. Red, green, yellow, blue, and purple. It was such an awesome shirt to me that I wore this thing every day. Every. Single. Day. Back then I was defying my parents, having “sleepovers” that actually led to me driving around at 3am in cars that belonged to my friends. There are some shirts you see or think about that remind you of your childhood, or the smell of roses because you wore it when you’d help your mom garden. This shirt did not smell of roses. To me, this shirt reminded me of how bad it tastes when you sneakily drink $4 vodka for the first time when your parents think you’re upstairs asleep. $4 vodka that I would later learn to mix with juice or other flavored drinks to mask the taste. This shirt reminded me of what it felt like in the summer to go pool hopping in the nice neighborhoods with your friends who you no longer speak to. This shirt really did  remind me of my insane childhood. I washed off the smell of smoke, alcohol, and debris from abandoned buildings I had bravely ventured into. But like the other two shirts, I had been giving extreme sentiment and power to what was merely a piece of dyed cloth. Like the other two shirts, it was from a time in my life that is long over with now. Like the other two shirts, it was placed neatly into the cardboard box. 

All these shirts used to have such a big impact on me. I felt more confident wearing them, I felt like I really knew myself when I put them on. I knew who I was and with each new shirt I gave intense meaning to, I began to be prouder of who I was and how far I had come. And I felt even stronger to be able to let these shirts go. Then, something happened. I paused for a moment. Sitting on the floor of the walk-in closet, I stared into the box. Black, blue, colorful. For a split second, I considered taking them out of the box. I began to think about how these shirts defined who I was. And though I don’t let them anymore, maybe it was enough that I had even considered getting rid of them. Maybe it would be okay to keep them in my closet just in case I wanted to pass them on. I stopped. What would I say to my children if I kept these shirts and gave each one to them. 

“Here is the shirt that has the logo of the place your Mom used to go, before it closed and her friends eventually stopped talking to her.”

“Here is the shirt that made her feel like she wasn’t good enough to go to school with the rich kids.”

“Here is the shirt that Mom wore when she drank vodka for the first time at 15, and broke into abandoned buildings to take photos.”

I pushed it out of my mind. I don’t need to keep these things. When my children are adults, I can tell them of my adventures in my youth, and of the depression and struggles I overcame. Three shirts in, what was next? I scanned my closet for other prominent shirts that had left me feeling confused, uneasy, and somewhat like I was back to that age again. I looked up.  A glowing yellow, worn out sleeve caught my eye now. I couldn’t even believe it was still in this closet, in this house, in my posession. I thought I had left it where I had gotten it. To someone who didn’t know me, or who had not gone through this same thing, this shirt would be completely worthless. It would bring back no memories, and it would not have been thought about ever again. Yet, I could feel my eyes beginning to burn as I stared at it, the dryness then relieved but only by a single tear that soon rolled down my cheek, dropping into the box. This shirt must go, along with every tear I ever shed over it. I got this shirt from my most recent job, the best job I ever had, the only job I was ever good at. It started in June of last year. 

When I started, it seemed like the entire world was in my hands. I was meeting amazing people every day, getting to work in the sunlight, absolutely thriving. I felt worth something finally. And it’s silly to hurt this bad over losing your job, so I guess this one was more about the way it went down. The woman who had to carry out the action her superior enforced, I’ll never forget the look in her eyes. I can’t forget the sound she made when she said the words, or shake the thought of her breaking down after I left - even though she really did. I caught her bouquet at her wedding, I drank and danced with her husband, I was one of few people who came to be with them on their special day, on the most exciting day of her life. I think it was the personal effect the shirt had on me that hurt so bad. I remember thinking we all looked so stupid in that bright yellow, every single day. Most times, I found any reason to not wear the damn shirt. But looking back, I would give so much to walk back into that office with that shirt in hand. It reminds me of all the things I left in my locker when I left, deciding to leave them behind out of sheer anger I felt in the moment. I had to leave behind the two best friend’s I had made. They were like older brothers to me, always wanting to teach me things, and play games together after work. It’s ironic because one of them shared the name with my actual brother who I don’t speak with anymore. One of them even invited me to his wedding, to meet his family. I remember spending Halloween completely alone until one of my coworker’s invited me to dinner with him and his daughter, and then picked up the bill. I’ll always feel nostalgic about the smell of cotton candy scented fog machines, because my teammates and I spent every weekend together going to various haunted houses. We went to dinners at places I’d never been, and found ourselves together along the Ohio river at 1am. I can’t believe I had all these people rooting for me for the first time in my life. And all of it was absolutely destroyed by one man’s selfish action. One man that I had only seen and spoken to once, who decided my worth without ever seeing me perform the thing I was best at. My whole life I wanted somewhere to fit in without worrying that somebody had ulterior motives. But there he was, the entire time I was so caught up in every other person accepting me, loving me, supporting me. I failed to see that this man was waiting for months to stab me straight in the back. He was waiting to put my superiors and I through the psychological torture of getting to know one another, and then forcing them to fire and cut ties with the people they’d grown to love. I’ll never forget the silence almost forming a ringing noise while we sat in that office for the last time with her. I won’t forget her voice breaking and getting quieter and quieter, before finally telling me “please fight for this.” Words that will stick with me forever, because I’ve been fighting for everything my entire life, and I finally had it. But like all good things, it ended. Like all good memories, it faded. And like all good people, they left. 

By now the tears were pouring down my face like an ocean, salty and stinging the skin on my cheeks. I gazed again at the neon yellow shirt. The words were fading on the back, and the front was worn with dirt and jet fuel. I still had bruises on my hands from my last day of work, a reminder to me that you can work hard, and put everything you have into something, and one day it will still crumble. That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned while growing up. You can interpret that lesson as a sad, grim message. But for me, it fuels me to continue on. It makes me want to try even harder, and tear myself up even more if it means I might find other genuine people with good motives in the world. People don’t think that something so small like T-shirts can have such a massive effect on somebody. Certain brands, shirts that have logos, and shirts that have been ripped and sewn back up that remind you that you are a survivor of terrible things. But maybe I’m just a highly emotional person. Maybe I have trouble letting go of things. But as I close the box full of shirts, most meaningless and outgrown, and some that once meant everything in the world to me, I am sure of one thing. Whatever I am - I am growing up. No matter where I go, what I go through, or how old I am, I am always growing up. Memories come and go, just like people and places. But the one thing that will always remain consistent for everyone from life until death is that they are always aging. We have always been growing up, and we always will be.