Object-ives #10: The Shirt That Slayed Demons

I collect the outgrown versions of my daughter

Nov 07, 2025

Demon Slayer anime corps t shirt — One of Colleen Wright’s daughter’s discarded anime T-shirts that she still sleeps in

At the start of each school year, I stand in my daughter’s closet and pull out one old piece of clothing after another for her consideration. She decides whether it’s a keeper, a donation, or trash. Usually I can predict the answers, but every so often there’s a surprise—like when I held up an old T-shirt with a character from Soul’s favorite anime on it. I’d already begun tossing it into the “keep” pile when Soul pronounced: donate.

A discard?

I hesitated, her once beloved tee in hand. The shirt was big enough to ease insecurities about her changing body in sixth grade, baggy enough to conceal the parts of her body she no longer liked in seventh, just three years ago.

“Would it be okay if I kept it?” I asked. “Just to wear around the house.”

“For sure,” she agreed, eyes already on the next piece in my pile, as if the shirt hadn’t traveled her entire middle school journey with us. As if it was just a shirt.

I valued that shirt like the answer it had been to my frantic questions about how to help my tween navigate identity questions and love herself, whoever she might be (and become). When she was little, I’d done all of the things to keep her physically safe but hadn’t considered back then that harm might come from her inner thoughts and feelings.

The T-shirt’s cotton felt soft in my hands, its black faded to charcoal. In my mind, I imagined the fabric hugging Soul through the difficult years of middle school, and stretching out more and more, like a balloon being filled with air, stretching to near breaking as it tried to contain and banish the doubts and anxieties of puberty.

I wear Soul’s shirt, that’s now my shirt, around the house. I wear it to bed at night. And sometimes, when I forget to change because it’s so comfortable, I wear it out.

“I can’t believe I’m still wearing this,” I tell Soul as we head into Target. I button my flannel so nobody can see the cartoon boy perched on my shirt, weapon in hand.

“You should be proud of it. You’re the cool mom,” Soul tells me.

I’m proud of our journey to the place we’re in now. We’ve always been close, but during those years I had to become more than a parent—I became a friend, confidant, and anxious monitor of her mental health. She was struggling to love herself, and I lived in constant fear of what that meant for her. After going to many counseling sessions together and apart, we’ve both come out the other side intact. She’s a happy tenth grader who’s back to calling me “cringe,” and I don’t obsessively google articles about teen mental health at 1, 2, and 3 in the morning. Our time together is spent crafting and chatting about nothing, which is to say everything.

As for wearing Demon Slayer in public, I’m not an anime fan, even though we watched and enjoyed all of the episodes of Demon Slayer and many others. I watched them with her because her mainstream friends shunned anime, then began to ignore Soul. She was too different, in many ways, for middle schoolers who just wanted to fit in: The clothes she liked were too big and unstylish, her new haircut too short. It wasn’t cool to read books at lunch like she did. I’d felt helpless to change the situation with her friends, and knew the internal work of loving her body and herself was up to her. But I could be her anime companion.

After dinner each night, we’d lay on my bed and admire Killua’s white hair (could she dye her hair—but not white?) and talk about how girl characters were never in the spotlight. For a time, anime consumed Soul’s world, and she collected characters in her drawings and her closet. Her pile of shirts grew with each new series we watched: Hunter x Hunter, Attack on Titan, Death Note. These titles turned my stomach, but I loved watching her unique identity emerge as she fell in love with sketching the characters, then just sketching in general. She got more into viola after trying to play show intros.

At school, she spied a girl with a One Piece button on her backpack, and they started chatting. At orchestra practice, a violinist saw Soul reading Heaven Official’s Blessing, and soon they were hanging out. These friends cared less about fitting in, and understood more about slaying demons—both the internal ones, and the ones they watched on their screens.

One day, I realized Soul hadn’t worn an anime shirt in some time.

“I’m trying to wear regular-sized shirts,” she said. She felt better about her body. She wanted to live in the world as more than “an anime kid.” In that moment, the happiness I felt could have filled up our faded T-shirt with enough joy to stretch it into a hot air balloon.

Sometime after a binge of Chainsaw Man, we stopped watching anime together. Soul has friends for that, so many friends that she can’t keep up with the series they ask her to watch. Part of me misses the evenings we used to lay and watch good vs. evil. I miss the excitement in her voice when she spies a shirt with her favorite character on it while shopping. Those moments are now shared with friends. Even though I miss our old ritual, I know this is what we’d both hoped for for her.

Now the relics of Demon Slayer and Hunter x Hunter and Attack on Titan sit in my bureau. It makes sense, in a way, that Soul has shed these identities that were once so important to her. Through them, she’s uncovered her own. But as her mom, I don’t discard who she was. I collect and love and miss every version of her: the artist, the questioner, the anime fanatic. I carry them with me always, and sometimes—when the T-shirt fits—I stash them in my pajama drawer.

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