SELF-AWARENESS

My Body Didn’t Change, My Brain Did

Getting dressed when your body image changes daily

Photo by Hunter Leibler on Unsplash

Sweat starts to gather along my hairline and neck, and my heart races. The clock on my phone turns to 7:45. I’m supposed to be in the car right now. I pull on a different pair of pants, but they won’t go with my regular shoes. My shirt feels wrong, fits wrong. My husband calls from downstairs, “It’s 7:50.” I surrender and put on the first outfit I tried on and rush out the door with a Costco protein bar in one hand and a banana in the other. Breakfast on the go again.

It’s a familiar sequence of events for me. There are countless weekday mornings spent overanalyzing outfits and spinning myself into a social anxiety-induced self-hatred spiral. My clothes are never right, my body is never right, and I’m never satisfied when I do end up out the door. Buying new clothes didn’t help, and neither did planning outfits in advance. And to top it off, some days I feel totally normal and get dressed in one try. I’m not sure why this keeps happening and what triggers it.

My habit of frantically changing outfits in the morning felt like an obvious symptom of my social anxiety. But on a deeper level, it was a product of mixing self-hatred for my body with a desire to be “good” and be likable. It was less about social anxiety and more about feeling confident in my own skin. But the part I got stuck on was why some days felt harder to deal with than others. I could take the same body and the same outfit, a week apart, and have a completely different panicked response, even if the last time I wore it, I felt confident and happy. What changed?

On the good days, I see the stretch marks running down the front of my stomach and think that they are beautiful and remind me of the gift of growing to nurture and carry my son. I see sculptural curves that make me feel effortlessly soft and feminine. On challenging body image days, I look at my body and see fat rolls, greasy hair, and clogged oily pores. My stretch marks feel like reminders of unwanted physical changes, of pounds gained and lost, of episodes of deep depression and self-loathing.

My clothes stayed the same, my body stayed the same, but my feelings toward my body changed every day.

Maybe the intense contrast would make sense if I looked physically different, but I don’t. I look 99% the same on any given day, but my mind perceives my physical appearance differently based on my mental state. Changing my clothes or changing my body would never fix the problem that existed only in my mind.

Figuring out that my self-perception is an unreliable narrator took a long time, and too many distraught morning meltdowns. But when it finally clicked for me, it dramatically changed my approach. My fits of anxious outfit changes were a symptom of a bigger body image problem that went beyond physical appearance.

My body wasn’t the problem. My brain was.

Once I realized the crux of my problem, I realized that I could stop the spiral before it happened. All I had to do was learn to recognize what kind of body image day it was and move on before things got out of hand and in my head.

Before I could tackle the challenging body image days, I had to be aware of the good body image days. On the mornings that it felt effortless to get dressed, I made a mental note of what I was wearing. Sometimes, I would even take a picture. I began to notice that they followed a loose formula. Comfortable stretchy pants, a blouse, and a neutral cardigan. Some days I would add in something experimental, like a patterned sweater or different shoes, but I made sure to do it on a day when I already felt good about myself.

Building an intentional awareness of how I dressed on good body-image days gave me a mental catalogue of outfits to pick from on the challenging days. And there was always a failsafe of wearing a monochrome all-black outfit on the extra hard days. My strategy began to bleed into how I got dressed for other events or even around the house. It simplified my decision-making and helped me overcome the overwhelm and overstimulation of trying to start from scratch every time I opened the closet.

If I started noticing signs of anxiety in my body, like feeling hot, a fast heart rate, or a tight chest, I would look at myself in the mirror, tell myself that I just needed to put on something I knew I liked before, then get dressed and leave. No going back and no getting dressed more than once.

Shifting the way I got dressed had a learning curve at first, but the longer I practiced, the easier it got. I still have an unreliable body image that can change day-to-day. But now, I can recognize a challenging body image day and adjust my outfit and my routine so that having a challenging mental state is something that affects me momentarily and doesn’t get to the point where my body is going into a stress response and making me late for work.

I’m still working on feeling reliably comfortable in my own skin, and I think it’s going to be a lifetime project. But I’ve accepted that I’m not going to have the same body image every day, and it’s okay to work with the unreliable narrator when I have to.

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