The Dress Fits. I’m Still Catching Up.

The dress came from Fashion Nova.

I know. Cheap fast fashion. I’m probably supposed to be ashamed to admit I shop there … but I’m not. I love that dress.

Mauve, with little lace details. It was bodycon; it clung. It showed my significantly smaller waist without exaggerating my broad shoulders and making me look like I was about to start throwing and catching balls at the fifty-yard line.

Just enough cleavage to make me feel less like a linebacker.

I felt like a lady in that dress.

Over the past year, I’ve lost more than a hundred pounds. Before the weight loss, I could fit into some fast fashion, but I didn’t like how it looked on me. Fitting into something and liking myself in it were two different experiences.

Apparently I’m an inverted triangle. Sometimes people say hourglass. How those two things can describe the same person, I don’t know; I have been asking myself the same question.

I think about color now. Whether something goes with my complexion. Whether I like the shape of it on my body. Before, I would leave the house in sweatpants or tights, whatever fit; getting dressed was mostly about getting covered and getting on with it.

I don’t mean there was nothing beautiful about me then. I mean I wasn’t giving myself much opportunity to enjoy it.

There was a why even try underneath the way I treated myself. I might not have said those words out loud. I could tell somebody else to take pride in how they presented themselves, and believe it, while putting very little of that care into my own clothes. Survival had seeped into everything. Even this.

Now I’m interested. That’s a change I want to keep.

But I have other habits that don’t disappear because I can wear something different.

I knew how to be the fat, funny friend. I like being funny; please don’t take my jokes. The trouble was how often I used being funny, being helpful, being available to reassure myself that there was a reason somebody wanted me around.

I could say something unkind about myself before anybody else had the chance. Let people know I knew I wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t conceited. I wasn’t under some mistaken impression that I was the beauty standard … don’t worry, I knew.

What a thing to keep assuring people of.

In one of the recordings I made while trying to write this, I said, “You cannot hate yourself enough for other people to love you.”

I have worried about being too pleased with myself, too sure of myself, as though liking what I see might offend somebody. Then I’ve made myself smaller in the conversation and found that people didn’t necessarily like that either. There is no amount of self-deprecation that settles the matter. Somebody can still decide I’m too much, too little, too whatever they were already inclined to think.

I don’t want to keep putting myself down just to make somebody else comfortable.

That doesn’t mean I suddenly don’t care what anyone thinks. I do. I want to be found attractive. I want to feel wanted without needing to be useful first. I can say that here; I’m trying to stop dressing every desire in something more respectable before I admit to having it.

I also don’t want to tell this story by turning my former body into an embarrassment.

There was a woman in those earlier photographs who was working, learning, loving people, trying. She already had taste. Already had a sense of humor. I don’t want every picture of her recruited into a before-and-after argument, as if the only interesting thing about that part of my life is what I weighed.

I know how quickly I can start looking for what’s wrong in a photograph. I’ve done it while working on this very site. It would be convenient if writing an essay about being kinder to myself meant I was now consistently kind to myself.

Well … it doesn’t.

And yes, I’ve already compared my shoulders to a linebacker’s. I still find that funny. I want to be able to make the joke and enjoy my body; I don’t want the joke to be the only thing I allow myself.

There’s a whole life I want to get dressed for. Art, music, an afternoon out. People I want to see. Someone I might want to be seen by.

I’m still catching up with my body. But I don’t have to talk myself out of enjoying that dress. The waist, the lace, the little bit of cleavage … I loved it.

Fashion Nova and all.