: The elusive “self-love”
Went downtown with some new friends, people I consider more fashionable than me. We stopped by a Carhartt store. They immediately knew how to find the good stuff, layer shit together, idk. Made a bunch of good-natured jokes about how they would “drip me out.”
At some point I walked by a mirror and realized just how abysmal my fashion sense really is. My wardrobe consists of precisely two kinds of clothing: Things I can wear to work, and things I can’t. My getting-ready routine is basically this:
clothes = work_clothes if today() in weekdays else other_clothes
while not fully_dressed():
cloth = clothes.pop_random()
try:
cloth.wear()
except:
pass
On this particular occasion I was wearing a poorly faded aloha shirt and jeans that were about 2 inches too short in the legs. Freshly laundered, poorly coordinated.
There is a part of me that wishes I were better at this. I feel envy when I look at people who put effort into their clothing and use it to their advantage. But every time I try to put in that extra effort, maybe coordinate colors or something, someone comments on it (“you look nice today”), which subjects me to the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Seen.
I have never had a great relationship with my corporeal form. I don’t like it when people notice what I look like, how tall I am, how I am shaped. It’s not that I’m an unattractive person, more that I find the suggestion that I “am” this body (as opposed to the soul inside of it) to be offensive. This is difficult to communicate to people, especially since so many people’s entire identity revolves around perfecting their body, e.g. through fashion and exercise.
But as I walked out of the store, having bought nothing, I tried to think the following thought instead: It’s alright to be me. It’s alright to care about different things than other people. Some folks customize their wardrobe and some folks customize their, uhh, text editor config (messing with Zed at the moment).
Baby steps on the epic journey of self-acceptance…