My office is in a Target dressing room

and other neuroses

This summer I’ve had bathing suit problems. I know, I know…don’t we all? My problems are related to size, as I’ve had some body size changes lately and nothing fits anymore. I went to Target one day recently directly in advance of a river trip and, not wanting to waste time trying stuff on, I just found a top that seemed like the right size and bought it. At the river’s edge I used every adolescent girl skill I still possess to don the suit (just the top, remember) without baring any undue skin. It was unreasonably tight. But I wore it anyway, and that top became the newest poorly fitting article of clothing in my collection.

My other problem this summer has been an insane workload which I brought upon myself. You may recall the Native American Studies for Teachers course I designed and taught and failed to cap? I ended up with 115 participants, 90% of whom signed up for some form of credit which led to a massive pile of Stuff To Grade. I’m digging out finally but it’s meant that the list of the other other stuff has been growing by the day.

How, you might wonder, do these two summer problems overlap? As anxiety and overwhelm¹ always overlaps: in a dream.

So there I was, being evicted. With almost no notice, my desk, my chair, my personal effects, all of it had to go. How no one had noticed my rent-free makeshift office built into a Target dressing room was anyone’s guess. I’d begun my slow occupation by trying on endless bathing suits. Many still hung on the hooks in the cubicle, others piled on the shabby carpet in corners. After a bit I’d started hanging out in there, spending time doing work on my phone, and then bringing in the laptop and perching on the round red stool while I dealt with emails. Eventually a desk made its way from the store’s home section into the cube, followed by a chair. At some point I’d cut a hole in an exterior wall for natural light. In an ethereal real-life reenactment of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler, I’d moved into the Target. And now the Target was ejecting me.

The day I wore my new, too-small bathing suit top to the river.

I’ve already presented an analysis of my dream, a predicament brought on by excessive bathing suit anxiety and a pile of grading. But is there potentially another interpretation? Perhaps, if I take another step back, it’s a way to think about compartmentalization and the many hats I’ve chosen to wear. I do this over here, and it stays discrete from that over there, and neither overlaps at all with the other thing on the other side of that line. It’s how I imagine psychologists and caregivers manage the trauma they witness: they divide their feelings into noncontiguous areas. Maybe I’ve just got too much going on, and I feel like I need a separate compartment — the resplendent crimson cubicle of a Target dressing room, for example — to feel like the rest of it is manageable.

What bothered me most when waking from that dream wasn’t its weirdness, nor its message about overcommitting myself, nor even its underhanded commentary on my stupid overflowing collection of ill-fitting bathing suits. It’s that I had to leave my makeshift office in such a hurry that I had no time to clean it up — tags and punched-holes and staples littered the floor, discarded bathing suits lined the hooks, a dead plant wilted in the corner — and the next occupant of the dressing room would find this detritus everywhere. I’ll just add that tidy-up preoccupation to my list of neuroses and wait for the next dream to tell me about it.

1. Traditionally I hate “overwhelm” as a noun but guess what? It’s a legitimate word, according to the OED. So I’m using it.