If our teens are a practice run for the rest of our lives, a chance to get all the bad outfit choices, alcohol poisoning and painful young romances out of the way before emerging into womanhood with an armor of life tools and nice boots, mine left me entirely unprepared.
At 14, I was left in chronic pain after an operation on my back went wrong. Three years of not being able to walk much further than the end of my road (and it’s not a very long road) were followed by two years of crippling depression and anxiety, which once again flung me into a petrified, bed-bound state. In a few weeks, I went from being a "normal" teenage girl on a constant mission to see how short a skirt I could get away with and saving up for a new pair of Topshop hotpants (with "pants" being the operative word), to a miserable recluse barely discernible in a puddle of baggy gray clothes.
Day after day in my bedroom, I experienced fashion vicariously via the Internet and TV. I would spend hours artfully curating Pinterest boards of everything I would wear once I got "better." My walls were covered with collages of beautiful things from the "real world" that I yearned for. One thing my years of relative seclusion did not prepare me for was how to dress myself. I had missed years of experimenting with what fashion meant to me, that reckless and necessary process of deciding what your clothes are going to say about you, what face you’re going to show to the world. Anything I knew about clothes came from the TV shows or films I was obsessed with, and the reality of dressing for a world where my clothes were suddenly a statement about my personality felt daunting.
It’s easy to think of clothes as things that only touch the surface, ignoring the reality that every decision that we make in the early hours of each morning is a statement, a shout into the void about who we are or who we want to be. Our clothes are the chainmail we put on daily to arm ourselves against the battle that is life and, as I begin to transition back into normal life, no longer confined to the prison of mental or physical illness, I find myself struggling with this very connection; the unbreakable bond between how I feel and what I’m wearing.
For a long time, the way I dressed was defined by my illness. The agony in my back meant any fabric touching it felt like razor blades and as a result, my wardrobe became a symbol of my discomfort. Morose black jumpers to drown my aching body, black leggings, baggy T-shirts and pajama shorts were my go-to ensemble. When I did leave the house, I felt an aggressive need to mask the sadness of what I was going through, to wear a disguise so no one knew how bad things were inside. I wore a headband with cat ears every day for a year, in the misguided belief that comical headwear would distract from the angsty brain underneath. At this point, I was in school part-time, and as you can imagine, my fondness for animal-themed headwear and year-round Christmas jumpers didn’t do wonders for my social life.
At 19, having spent six years watching nothing but Friends, Girls, and Sex and the City, I became convinced the only thing I needed to get "better" was to move from London to New York. I set off for the most fashionable city on the planet armed with 10 pairs of PJs, three Christmas jumpers, and absolutely no idea about how it was going to turn out. Now, at 20, studying English Literature at NYU and living in the West Village, I’ve had a year and a half of frozen winter nights, 99-cent pizza, and a realization that "better" is something far more transient and undefinable than I’d ever previously imagined. I find myself still fairly anxious, but happier and stronger than I’ve been in years.
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