The Hoodie You're Wearing is Fine

Image from Pinterest.

There's a flyer that comes home in my kids' folders a few times a year, and every time I see it I feel kind of disappointed. Not in any big way, but in a way that's been nagging at me long enough that I finally have to write about it.

Pajama Day.

Even my daughters are over it at this point. The first one of the year, sure, they picked their sets out the night before rather excitedly. But we're somewhere around pajama day number five now, and the luster has officially worn off, which honestly tells you something. When the seven-year-olds are bored of it, you have to wonder what we're still doing.

The longer I've sat with my own irritation about this, the more I've realized it isn't really about the flyer but actually, it's about something I've been watching for years in my work.

When a client begins working with me and says she doesn't feel like herself anymore, one of the first things I quietly listen for is what she's wearing, and how she talks about it. Almost always, somewhere in the first few sessions, she'll mention it. I haven't put on real clothes in months. I caught myself in the mirror this morning and just sort of had on the same thing I've been wearing for weeks. I just don't feel like myself anymore. It's usually said with a small embarrassed laugh, like she's apologizing for a minor lapse in upkeep.

She doesn't yet know she's telling me something much bigger than that.

What she's telling me is that one of the small daily ways she used to maintain a relationship with herself has gone quietly offline. Things she hasn't yet connected back to it are starting to go offline too.

Why this is more than vanity

I want to be careful here, because I know how easily a piece like this can tip into the kind of woman in the carpool line who needs everyone in pressed collars. That's not the argument. I love a cashmere sweatsuit as much as the next over-functioning woman in her thirties. I've made peace with the matching set.

The argument is that clothing is a form of self-instruction. The structured pant tells your nervous system you're in charge of something. The clean shirt tells it you mean business. The soft, beautiful sweater tells it you're allowed to take up space without performing for anyone. The denim that fits well tells it you're someone, with a body, who exists.

The hoodie tells it, again and again, nothing in particular, which is sometimes exactly what you need. But when it becomes the default, it slowly becomes the entire conversation you're having with yourself about who you are.

The clothes you put on your body are sensory information your nervous system receives from the moment you dress until the moment you undress. Over enough days and weeks and months, that information shapes the version of yourself you have access to. A woman who has been wearing the same loungewear for two years has been telling herself, for two years, that she's not someone who needs to be addressed today. That's not a small thing.

When she finally walks in and says she doesn't feel like herself, I'm not surprised. She hasn't been speaking to herself like herself in a long time.

The cultural drift

We've quietly agreed, over the last few decades, that effort is the enemy of ease and that dressing with any intention is somehow at odds with being comfortable. Unintentionally, we've convinced ourselves that the only real way to relax is to look like we've given up. That the highest version of a fun day, for a kid or for any of us, is the one where we don't try at all.

I understand why we got here. The athleisure economy is a multi-billion-dollar machine. The pandemic blew the doors off the last remaining conventions about what one wears to leave the house. We were exhausted, and honestly, deserved to be soft for a while. I'm not exempt either.

But the drift is not neutral, and that's the part we don't talk about. It's doing something. Specifically, it's dismantling, slowly and without our consent, one of the most accessible daily mechanisms women had for staying in touch with themselves. We used to get dressed for a day…now we get ready for one. The two are not the same thing. And the woman who gets ready every morning but hasn't gotten dressed in months is, in my experience, the woman who eventually shows up wondering why she feels blurred, dulled, and vaguely absent from her own life.

How you do one thing

There's a phrase that floats around in coaching and therapeutic circles, and like a lot of those phrases I think it gets thrown around too easily. But it's also really true. How you do one thing is how you do anything.

I'm not suggesting that a structured pant fixes your marriage. I am suggesting that the morning a woman decides it doesn't matter what she wears is, almost always, the morning she decides a hundred other small things don't matter either. Whether she makes the bed or if she finishes the coffee or leaves it cold on the counter. Whether she answers the text or lets it sit for three days. Whether she takes the long walk or the short one. The decisions accumulate. The day is built out of them. And by 4 p.m. she's wondering why she feels a little dull, a little less like herself, and she blames her hormones, or the weather, or her job.

It began, often, with the hoodie. With the small, quiet morning agreement she made with herself that today did not require her. That today, she would not show up. That today, she would be a person in passing, not a person in particular.

The body knows. The body always knows.

Back to the flyer

This is what I find myself thinking about when I see the pajama day flyer in my daughter's folder. Not really the pajamas. What I'm thinking about is what we're modeling, on a much larger scale, when we tell our daughters that the most celebrated kind of day is the one that asks the least of them. We're basically saying the height of a special occasion is the absence of effort and showing up for yourself is something you do reluctantly, for school and work…and the fun version of being a person is the one where you opt out.

I don't want my daughters to embrace that norm. I don't want that for any of us, which means I think we have to be willing to say, quietly and without shame, that the small daily act of choosing what to put on your body actually matters. It's not just superficial, it's one of the ways a woman maintains a relationship with herself across decades. That stopping is not neutral.

So, to be clear

I'm not against comfort. I'm against confusing comfort with surrender. I don't think we should be waiting for an occasion to wear something that makes us feel motivated and pleased with ourselves, when the occasion is, every single time, just today.

There is no occasion coming. The occasion is the body you live in and the day you've been given. You get to decide whether you show up for it dressed for the meeting, or dressed for nothing in particular.

Put on the thing.

You'll feel the difference by lunch.

x, Yana

This piece was originally published in Little Notes from Your Therapist.

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A note on privacy: this is not about one specific person. It is a composite drawn from patterns I have seen across many years and many rooms. No real client, session, or otherwise identifying markers.

This post is written for educational purposes and is not medical or mental health advice, nor a substitute for care from a licensed provider. Reading it does not create a therapist-client relationship. If you are in crisis or need urgent support, call or text 988 in the United States, or call 911.