Smaller Sweaters and Little Boxes
Well, the weather’s getting cooler and I’ve started wearing my boots again. I’ve brought out my grey men’s pants to wear with them, as well as some thicker crew socks. It feels good. I made a last-ditch attempt to rescue my white pencil skirt by re-washing it and throwing it in the dryer and, by god, it worked. Of course, now it’s not really not hot enough to wear it with bare legs and I’m back to not shaving my legs again anyway.
So the idea of tights came to mind. I’ve had some bad experiences with tights. For example, while working office temp jobs, I would wear them with stretchy pencil skirts and it’d look great in the mirror at home. Then I’d spend the entire day wrestling the skirt back into position as it stuck to the tights and rode up to my waist. But I have some slippery bike-short-type things for swimming which might solve the problem.
My other concern with wearing tights with a white skirt was, what color? So I went on Pinterest and started searching. And I was surprised to find plenty of photos of white skirts worn with black tights. I do own a pair of black tights, along with one other pair in a weird purpley-grey textured weave. I got those at American Apparel and they actually work pretty well as a neutral. Except with white, in which case they make your legs look blue. So black it is. With the slippy-shorts over them I guess? The shorts are black, too, so it seems like the best option I’ve got. I don’t know if this skirt is even worth all this trouble- it just seems so complicated. I mean, don’t even get me started on the shoes and socks issue. So the skirt may just go. I just don’t feel I’m advanced enough, fashion-wise, to figure it all out in a graceful and easy manner.
I tried on a couple of smaller sweaters the other day, hoping to change up the every-single-day-oatmeal-sweater for something more exciting. I put on a pale pink cashmere sweater from Cynthia Rowley that I got on Thredup. The neckline is kind of tight and the shoulders seem a bit shrunken, so I whipped it off and put it back in the drawer. I tried a dark grey zip-up cardigan with a mock neck and these sort of structured shoulders. It fit and everything, but it looked really weird with my baggy jeans and belt. I guess it is pretty fitted through the body, and that got me thinking about this change-over to my smaller clothes. I’ve already explored theoretically whether my clothes in storage will fit my more masculine style. But trying them on is another thing. I may have misjudged how suitable certain things are for my changing aesthetic.
Which got me right back to thinking about The Men’s Pants Epiphany and what these different clothes were supposed to mean. I thought they meant more autonomy, a more authentic expression of myself, a braver, more creative me. But I feel like I’ve dropped the ball in terms of fulfilling those aspirations.
I have a fantasy of really going off the grid artistically, making things that I think are good, and are not necessarily commercially attractive. But I’ve trained myself so well over the years to fit into little boxes: modern dancer, musical theater performer, opera singer, straight theater actress. And all that I’ve found from doing this is that I never fit the mold. I’m too serious for some people, too quirky for others, always too old or too young or too fat. I tried hard to be what people were looking for, but I never really got the hang of it. It all made me nervous, and feeling like a phony, neither of which was great for auditions.
So now I’m trying to just let myself be, and do things that speak to who I really am. The trouble is, I can’t think of what to do. I’ve written some music over the years, and I guess I hope to get back to it. But it’s hard not to look at it as a commercial endeavor. Plus I feel like I’m wasting all these years of experience and training (and money) by not pursuing my old career(s). But I know I can never go back to it after the mental health crisis I’ve been through. I’m too fragile, too broken. It makes me too frustrated, too self-critical, and ultimately, too suicidal.
So what about these other things- the songwriting, the poetry? Those feel like a waste of time because no one will ever hear them or read them. They’d just be trees falling in the woods. The thing it’s hard to keep in mind is that they’d be my trees- not someone else’s songs that I learned to parrot back for old white men to judge. Maybe I wouldn’t feel like a delicate creature thrust out into the open to be scrutinized for her body, her hair, her choice of footwear. Instead I could stay protected, nurtured, private. I could write secrets only to be whispered in the safest of places. I could hide behind a screen like a violinist at an orchestra audition. I could send out anonymous work to the internet. The problem still is, I can’t get started. I don’t know how or where to start. Everything’s still trapped inside, afraid.
