A midlife career change and a drawer full of unworn band tees allowed our writer to achieve her most elusive life goal.
“There’s nothing more embarrassing than people my age wearing t-shirts of their favorite bands,” my co-worker said, rolling his eyes. He could just as easily have said people our age since we were both 50. The two of us, university librarians, were at the reference desk, in a library full of college students wearing whatever they liked.
I had noticed that some of the kids sported Nirvana and Ramones t-shirts, which annoyed me. They weren’t old enough to have experienced the double gut punch of Kurt Cobain’s and Joey Ramone’s premature deaths; they had no idea what these bands had meant to my generation. Gen Z hadn’t earned the right to wear those shirts—I had. And yet, had I glanced down at myself at that moment, I’d have seen a plumpish middle-aged female body swathed in a very conservative and age-appropriate tailored blazer, blouse, and black trousers.
My colleague was in his typical winter uniform of a button-down shirt, bow tie, and tweeds. I adored him—he was smart and funny, and kept me entertained for hours—but I couldn’t help but envy him a little, too. He was a tweeds-and-tie guy to his very core; he naturally fit in better than I did at a university job. I always felt as if I were in costume at work.
On a college campus, the message to employees was clear: While students may express themselves via their wardrobes, you must not. They are the paying customers, and you are the hired help. Sometimes this message was made explicit—I once worked at a college that forbade employees from ever wearing jeans or sneakers. More often, there was just the silent chill of disapproval anytime I showed up in anything too casual or offbeat. My beloved 1970s-style corduroy overalls? Those elicited puzzled stares the one and only time I dared to wear them. And that frigid winter day when I sported a pair of black arm warmers that I thought made me look sort of goth and cool, like Kate Bush or Siouxsie Sioux? A colleague expressed concern—she thought I’d sustained some terrible injury that required me to wear not just one but two arm braces. Anyway, the message was clear: Act your age. For the students that meant freedom, and for a 50-year-old librarian, obedience and conformity. I didn’t want to lose my job, so I dressed the way I thought I should. But I can’t say that I liked it—not the job nor the stuffy dress code.
Though I felt too embarrassed to mention it at the time, I had a drawer full of band t-shirts, and I regarded the oldest one, an R.E.M. t-shirt that I bought in 1986, to be among my most prized possessions. It confirmed my status as someone who was a fan of the band before they became popular in the 1990s, but the shirt, depicting a view of the band’s hometown of Athens, Georgia, had almost never been worn. No occasion felt sufficiently special to justify the wear and tear. It’s a deep black color, as dark as when I bought it at the merch table in the Wang Center in Boston nearly 40 years ago. The shirt evoked fond memories—but also regret. Every time I looked at it, I remembered that The Feelies had opened the show that night. I’d wish I’d splurged on one of their shirts, too. If only I had known when I was 18 that I would want it decades later. But back then, the future was a blur. I didn’t know who I would become, let alone what I would want to wear.
When I graduated from college, I substituted the things that I wanted to wear with clothing I thought I should wear. For example, when I left school and started my first job as a dictionary editor, I once showed up at a social event in one of my work outfits: matching blouse and skirt, pantyhose, and pumps. “You’re like a Glamour ‘do’,” one of my friends remarked. That magazine had a long-running column in which a photographer captured supposedly good and bad fashion choices out in the real world. To be thought of as a “do” rather than a “don’t” was a relief. I wanted so badly to get everything right.
This mania for getting everything “right” feels like a very female kind of obsession. I think of a quote attributed to Bob Dylan, “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” No offense to the Nobel laureate (whom I’ve never seen live and whose shirt I don’t own) but that doesn’t feel like an attainable goal for most women—even ones who are far more accomplished than I am. I don’t know any woman who doesn’t spend most of her time making other people feel comfortable, trying to meet with their approval. As I grew older, though, I realized that the thing that would make me happier wasn’t doing what I want all day long, but rather, not having to care about what other people think about what I do. Which is how, last year, on the cusp of age 55, I came to give notice at my library job.
It’s not as if I didn’t think long and hard about it. I knew that people would think I was crazy to walk away from a tenure-track job at a thriving university, one of the rare schools that was financially solid with robust enrollment. It meant throwing away the possibility of lifetime employment and a steady income. I longed for those things as much as anyone else in this chaotic economy—but they just weren’t enough.
It was in the summer of 2021 when I knew for sure that I had to make a change. My boss had just informed me that our pandemic-era remote arrangement was coming to an end; we’d be returning to the office three days a week. I had been working from home happily and productively for more than a year at that point, surrounded by my favorite things: books, a small art collection, and my two cats. And so, even though there was no actual need for me to work in person at this particular job—my title was Electronic Services Librarian, meaning I was helping people access e-resources from remote locations—I was getting to the office at 8:30 in the morning most days, in order to sit all day long in a windowless room while interacting with no one other than the security guards. Still, I had to dress to be seen—some dean or provost might glimpse me for a moment in the hallway and report me to my boss if I didn’t pass muster. I had been ordered to show up onsite, not because that’s how I worked well or felt my best, but because some administrator somewhere on campus said so.
After a few weeks, I decided: The only person I was going to allow to exert that much control over how and where I worked was me. That evening, I emailed a career counselor and grabbed the first slot on her schedule.
I spent six months and many hundreds of dollars meeting weekly with her. She helped me revamp my resume and brush up on my interviewing skills. She pushed me to think about what I really needed to thrive in a job, and sent me encouraging emails with subject lines like, “Awesome job—keep going.” She’d contact me after our meetings to tell me that she hoped I was having a good week, in spite of my job situation. “It’s hard when there isn’t autonomy or an appetite for change in a workplace culture,” she’d write, commiserating with me. It would have been nice to feel seen and heard at my actual job, but working with her made me realize that there were people out there capable of seeing and hearing me—and that nothing that I wanted from work was really all that unreasonable.
She helped me see that I had acquired other job skills over the years, ones that I could turn to for a mid-life career pivot. When I had edited dictionaries as a recent college graduate, I had learned to carefully proofread the definitions—including all the pronunciations, with their fussy diacritical marks. Those skills of mine were rusty, but I resolved to improve them. Even though I still had my full-time job—and really needed that income—I practiced at night and on weekends, got better, and was able to pass an edit test at an agency that offered remote work.
While I did love the feeling of mastery I had acquired after many years as a librarian, in the end that didn’t satisfy me. Now every day at my current job is, I must admit, a new humiliation—people a fraction of my age are (politely!) pointing out all the mistakes I make, all the things I don’t know. Still, after decades in the professional world I don’t feel as if I’m being judged on my appearance or my failure to conform. I appreciate the great privilege of being allowed to work from home. I don’t take it for granted. If anything, I wish that everyone could have what I have. While remote work isn’t possible or even desirable for everyone, the ability to show one’s true self at work—that’s something that should be universally available.
I am lucky, and I show my appreciation for the privilege I’ve been given by making sure that I wear one of my prized band shirts every single day. These shirts are my history as a music fan made tangible: I’ve got a pink Pixies shirt from their 2004 reunion tour, and a lavender Le Tigre shirt from 2003 emblazoned with the words, “Bands Against Bush.” I’ve got a moody gray-and-black Jesus and Mary Chain shirt that reminds me of the period when I listened to their album Darklands on repeat, as well as a Morrissey shirt that makes me laugh since it grandiosely presents the singer as a Warhol icon, a single image of his face imprinted on the front multiple times in shades of bright blue, yellow, and pink. I have so many shirts, I can go weeks without doing laundry, and still have a fresh one to wear each day.
I need to take all my old work clothes to Goodwill to make room in my dresser for the new shirts I plan to acquire. Over the last few years, it seems that just about every band I loved when I was young has gone on tour. There’s something exhilarating about watching so many of them go out on the road. They were always defiant—it used to be defiance directed towards authority. Now, I think, they just feel defiant toward limits—the sense that time is finite, and that we’re under so much pressure to not make the most of it. At a show I attended earlier this year, Sleater-Kinney played songs from their new album, Little Rope, inspired in part by the sudden death of Carrie Brownstein’s mother and stepfather in a 2022 car accident. When between songs, Brownstein urged us to remember that “life is so short,” she nearly brought me to tears. I looked down at the bright-blue vintage Sleater-Kinney shirt I had preserved so meticulously, realizing I’d gotten it all wrong: It’s life—not clothing—that’s too precious to waste. That’s what the songs had been telling me all those years. I just hadn’t really been listening.
I miss my old co-worker with his bow ties and tweeds. Maybe someday, I think, I’ll find an opportunity to explain myself to him. He thought that his peers who wore band t-shirts were clinging to youth. No, I want to say to him, this is about freedom, not nostalgia. If anything, I am rejecting the past—at least the part of the past in which I felt too timid and fearful to express myself. From now on, I’m rejecting the idea that I should trade all the things I cared about as a kid—creativity, art, and music—for careerism and respectability. Nirvana had a song, the title of which used to describe me perfectly: “All Apologies.” Now I’m making no apologies: I’m reclaiming my real interests and values, finally. That’s what I’m clinging to, and I’m never going to stop. I’m going to wear the crap out of those R.E.M. and Sleater-Kinney shirts—until they finally fall apart.
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