What I shed, What I keep
What I Shed, What I Keep
Every few months, an old version of himself quietly expires and a new one takes its place: a different hat, softer pants, fewer social feeds tugging at his skin. This is the story of a man in his seventies, tracking a lifetime of reinventions — wardrobes, houses, work, even underpants — to ask what he is willing to shed, and what he will fiercely keep.
Every few months, something in me starts to itch. Not on the skin — somewhere under it. A quiet insistence that the man I was three months ago is slightly out of date. So I molt, gently, and agree to become someone else.
Two months ago, I put Facebook and Twitter away. Not in a grand dramatic gesture, just… closed the tabs and did not open them again. The hours that came back to me drifted into writing instead. I found myself at the keyboard, telling small stories with a boyish enthusiasm I thought I had lost. This essay is one of the side effects. Sometimes, out of habit, my hand still reaches for Twitter when the news mentions Iran and war. I wander in, look around, and wander out again. The old urgency is gone. The hooks are out of my skin.
It has always been like this with me. New spectacles that change the way the world looks on my nose. A moustache grown on a whim, then reinforced with a goatee, then shaved back to a thin strip, as if I were negotiating with my own face. For a while, there were fedoras. Then baseball caps. The hats arrived around 2008, when my hair began to thin and I realised panic was a poor look on a man in his fifties. A good hat, I decided, was more dignified than despair.
My wardrobe followed the same slow argument. Until about 2012, I was a Myer man. Work pants, collared shirts, nothing that announced itself. Then Uniqlo opened in Sydney and something shifted on the hanger. I tried on a collarless linen shirt and a pair of tapered pants and felt an almost physical click of recognition. When Muji came, I drifted there too. I liked the Japanese restraint — clothes that did their job quietly, each piece earning its place. With a fedora on my head, I had, without planning it, become a “signature” dresser.
Then Covid came and turned the whole arrangement on its head. Working from home from 2020, I gave in to stretch pants. No zippers, no belts, no pretence. At first it was a temporary truce. Then the months dragged on, and the elastic waist stayed. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being a concession and became a way of life.
Now I am in my seventies. The sixties finished what Covid started. Still at home, still in stretch pants, I added stretch t‑shirts from the same two shops and a small fleet of hoodies. Walking around the suburb meant more sun on old skin. My doctor, practical as ever, was pointed about cancer. “Layer up,” he said, as if talking about an onion. I layered up.
I looked down at my feet as well. The Rockports, good soldiers, were retired with thanks. In came black Brooks running shoes. “Running” was what the box claimed; my walking pace disagreed, but I decided not to argue. They were light, forgiving, with nothing to prove. For the rare formal occasion — my youngest’s wedding, for example — I bought two pairs of Australian leather boots, one black and one brown. Not bad, I thought, for a boy who once shuffled around Sri Lanka in DI and Bata shoes, saving his better pair for Sunday Mass.
Somewhere in all of this, another small revolution took place. I stopped wearing underpants at home. There was no manifesto. One day I simply chose comfort over habit, and the old ritual failed to report for duty.
Underpants have their own long history in my life. It began with jockstraps at school — compulsory, scratchy contraptions that cut into teenage skin and pride. Then Dubai, where I slipped into the rhythm of the Gulf and bought loose cotton shorts at the bazaar. Every man wore them under his dishdasha. Sold in leaning stacks at the souk for almost nothing. Simple, practical, perfect for heat that wrapped the body like a second shirt. Back then, I did not think of them as “underwear”. They were just what you wore.
Later, as Western brands flowed into Dubai, I moved to Jockeys. Sydney brought Bonds white briefs, very Australian, very no‑nonsense. Then boxer shorts, which felt like progress — more air, more freedom. And now, in this small brick house in suburban Sydney, nothing at all. A free man, in the most literal sense. The schoolboy in the changing room, the young hotel worker at the Dubai souk, the new migrant reaching for a Bonds three‑pack in a fluorescent supermarket aisle — none of them could have imagined this ending. The man in his seventies is perfectly comfortable with the arrangement.
The restlessness was never only about fabric. It extended to roofs. Not just the roofs I slept under as a son or a tenant, but the ones I made happen. My first house went up in Sri Lanka in my twenties, paid for with money earned in Dubai’s heat. I remember tracing the plan with my finger on thin paper, not quite believing any of it was real. Less than two months after I landed in Australia, I signed for a patch of land and started again. Then another house. And another. And another. I am living now in the sixth house I have built.
If all goes to plan, within a year I will pack boxes again. This time, I will not be building from a bare block but moving into an apartment on Sydney’s north side, closer to one of my children. A different kind of roof, a different kind of view. No well at the back, no coconut trees, just elevators and balconies and a strip of sky between towers.
The pattern shows up in relationships too. One lasted about thirty years and brought me four children. Another held for seven. A third was platonic, a companionship held in a quieter key. Three, if I count only the times someone else’s toothbrush lived next to mine.
Children were always at the centre of it. I wanted more. I pictured a child from a poor Sri Lankan family, suddenly transplanted into the soft chaos of an Australian home, finding their footing. My partner then did not agree. We shelved the idea without drama. But sometimes, when I see a teenager on a Western Sydney bus with a face that reminds me of home, I think of the life that never quite arrived.
Work was another skin I kept changing. I enrolled in accounting and then walked away from it, drawn instead to a full‑time telecom apprenticeship at the only telco in Sri Lanka. I learnt about cables, exchanges, the quiet hum behind a ringing phone. Two years later, I was on a plane to Dubai, hired as a telex operator in a hotel, reading messages that crossed borders long before emails did. Four months after that, I slipped into a British bank. A few years on, I moved sideways into technology.
After a decade and a bit, I let go of that life and boarded yet another flight, this time to Australia. There was more banking, this time at the top end of town. In one Sydney bank, I worked my way through nine different roles. Infrastructure. Cloud. Customer experience. I moved across the organisation like a man who could not quite make himself comfortable in any one chair.
Six years ago, I landed in customer experience — CX and UX, as the slide decks say. Nothing to do with cables or server rooms anymore. A long way from the young telecom apprentice in Colombo who thought he had his life neatly mapped in front of him.
He didn’t. But that, I have come to understand, was the point.
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