I Cut All The Size Tags Off My Clothes, You Should Too | The Odyssey Online
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I Cut All The Size Tags Off My Clothes, And It Was So Liberating, So I'm Encouraging You To Join Me

How I liberated myself from the arbitrary constraints of size and created the #TossYourTags campaign.

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I Cut All The Size Tags Off My Clothes, And It Was So Liberating, So I'm Encouraging You To Join Me
Instagram

I was sitting in a SmashTALK by McCall Dempsey, founder of Southern Smash, the other week as she jokingly said, "Your size doesn't matter, heck, cut the sizes out of your clothes, do what you have to do." The crowd laughed and quickly moved on to listening to the rest of her speech, but this small portion of her talk hit me deeper.

It sparked inspiration in me.

I've struggled with the concept of size my whole life. Rather than choosing clothes that I felt good in and fit me, I assigned a deeper value to them based on their labels. On days I could wear smaller sized clothes, I felt more confident and valuable than the days where I wore larger sized ones. What I didn't realize was that this mindset was causing me to miss out on not only a ton of cute fashion, but also part of my life.

A while ago, I heard of a non-profit organization called The Garment Project, whose mission is to "empower women recovering from an eating disorder and provide them with new, size-less clothing, individualized for their healthy bodies and lifestyles." And after hearing McCall reiterate this idea, I decided to go ahead and do it.


So one night at midnight I put on some music and took scissors to all of my clothes and created a collage out of all their tags, topping it off with one of the most empowering mantras in my own eating disorder recovery: I am NOT my size.

And for the first time in my life, I'm really starting to believe I'm not, partially because I did this. All of the clothes I cut the tags out of fit me, and they ranged over 6 sizes. So why would I base my worth off of something that is so fluid and unpredictable? Also, why do we even need to know the size of our clothes after they're already in our possession? To define ourselves with the limited vocabulary that size holds?

I encourage everyone to join me and #TossYourTags —it's one of the most liberating things I've done.

Image Credit: Instagram

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