Mata Traders Dress
I uploaded these photos to a draft weeks ago, but couldn’t find anything to say. In the olden days, I might have called this blog burnout and despaired over my lack of motivation to write anything “on topic,” but that wouldn’t represent reality.
The reality is that any burnout I feel has nothing to do with losing momentum on the sustainable fashion front – though certainly some of my positioning and specific research interests have and will continue to change, especially since I’m about to start a program steeped in ethics, theology, and systems change.
I’m just plain old overwhelmed.
My official move date is July 22nd, which feels simultaneously far away and urgently close. In the time I have left in Charlottesville, I need to attend to all the logistical things around packing and starting school in another state (ugh, where are my immunization records?!), do quite a bit of work toward the ordination process with the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, and help hire and train my replacement at the shop.
And then there’s also the matter of attending to my – and others’ – emotional needs. I will desperately miss my work and church communities, my choir pals, my lifeline friends who have seen me through some of the most significant years of my life so far. And I don’t want to start looking so far ahead that I forget what I’m leaving behind.
Ethical Details: Dress – c/o Mata Traders for an upcoming Bead & Reel collab; Glasses – vintage via Retrospecced ; Shoes – secondhand Tevas via ebay
I am thankful for the gift of time and space – and perspective – that have allowed me to get to a place where I can sit with all of these feelings and stresses – with this absolute chaos – and still say, at the end of the day, “It is well.”
And I am SO excited to be able to enter a program – and hopefully a vocation – that speaks to my whole self. I was worried when I first experienced a call to church ministry that it would require a kind of narrowing-in, a limiting of all the things that bring me joy in favor of “this one thing.” But now I’m seeing that this path has opened up a wider space, a broader discourse, an absolute flood of possibilities.
And all I can say is, “it is well.”
