I Could Never Pull That Off
A sentence I have said out loud in shops for ten years, in the voice you use for stating your own height. It is not a fact, and I think I know where it comes from.
There is a rail in every shop I do not walk down. I could not tell you when I decided that. I only know that by the time I noticed, it had stopped feeling like a decision and started feeling like a fact about me.
Where the sentence actually comes from
I used to think I could never pull that off was about the mirror. It is not. When I have caught myself saying it, I have not been picturing myself in the thing. I have been picturing being seen in the thing, by people whose reaction I have invented.
It is never really about the garment. It is about being seen trying. And the specific fear is not that you will look bad, it is that you will look like someone who was hoping.
The rules nobody actually gave me
Somewhere I acquired a list. No crop tops. Nothing with a pattern that big. Not that colour with this hair. Nothing that suggests I spent time on it.
Nobody handed me that list. I cannot name a single person who told me any of it. And yet I have been enforcing it for a decade with the consistency of someone following a law.
What changed it was not confidence
I want to be careful here, because the useless version of this advice is wear what you want. If that worked, none of us would need to read anything.
What actually worked was much more boring. I wore the thing indoors, alone, on a day I was not going anywhere. Then around the flat. Then to take the bins out. By the time I wore it in front of anyone it had stopped being an event, and an outfit that is not an event does not attract the reaction you were dreading.
The fear is real, but it is attached to novelty rather than to the garment. You can simply exhaust the novelty in private first.
Start with one loud thing in a safe context
Not a whole new wardrobe. One piece, louder than you would normally allow, worn somewhere with low stakes.
The three below are roughly in order of how much nerve they take, and the honest answer is that the loud one stopped feeling loud after about the fourth wear. That is a shorter runway than I expected, and shorter than the years I spent not walking down that rail.
The loud one
A cropped patchwork plaid in sage and periwinkle is not a quiet garment, and if you have a version of the list I described, something like this is on it.
It is also the easiest kind of loud to live with, because outerwear is the layer you can take off. You are not committed for the whole day. That makes it the right thing to practise on.
The safe one that is quietly not
A cream oversized hoodie is about as unthreatening as clothing gets. Nobody has ever been looked at twice for one.
The detail is on the back, which is the part of this I like. You know it is there. Most people you pass do not. If you are working up to being seen, a thing that is only visible when you walk away is a reasonable first step.
The one that is only for you
Nobody outside your flat is going to see this and that is the point of including it.
The rule I broke first was not a public one. It was that comfortable and put together were separate categories and I had to pick. Wearing something at home that I would not be embarrassed to answer the door in turned out to be the smallest possible version of the same argument, and a good place to start it.
Questions I was asked
- I genuinely do not have the confidence for the loud one.
- Neither did I, and wear what you want is useless advice. What worked was wearing it indoors on a day I was going nowhere until it stopped being an event. The fear attaches to novelty, not to the garment, and you can exhaust novelty in private.
- Is a cropped jacket wearable if I do not like my middle?
- A cropped layer sits at the narrowest part of most people and it is outerwear, so you can take it off. That is why it is the easiest loud thing to practise on rather than the hardest.
- What if people say something?
- In my experience they say something once, on the first wear, and then it is just a jacket. Four wears was the whole runway for me, against about ten years of not walking down that rail.
['I still have the list. It is shorter than it was, and I have stopped treating the remaining items as facts about my body rather than habits I picked up.', 'You do not need more clothes. You need to stop feeling like a stranger in the ones you already own, and that is a much smaller problem than it feels like at nine in the morning.']
Nora