My Body, My Comfort: Dressing for the Body I Have Right Now

There is a page in my capsule wardrobe workbook called My Body, My Comfort, and it comes down to one simple idea: dressing for the body you have today, not the one you are working toward. Out of everything I wrote when building this workbook, this is the page that took me the longest to actually sit with. It asks a few simple questions. What fabrics do you feel most comfortable in? What do you avoid wearing? What are you usually wearing when you feel most like yourself? And the one that got me thinking the most: the one thing you wish you could wear more of.

I love soft, flowy fabrics that sit gently on the skin, but I have a rule for myself that took me a while to figure out. Not tight, but not shapeless either. I want to still see some shape when I am dressed; I just don’t want to feel it pulling or pinching anywhere. There is a middle ground between comfortable and put together, and once I found it, I stopped shopping outside of it.

That middle ground did not come easily, though. There was a period, long before any of what I have written about the retrenchment, where I was not buying anything for myself at all. Not because I decided to; it just happened the way things happen when you are a mom who has spent years putting everyone else first. My clothes got old and worn without me really clocking it, until people close to me started noticing before I did. Looking back now, I can see it clearly: the state of my wardrobe was just a mirror of where my head was at.

Somewhere over the past two years I made a proper, conscious decision to change that. To dress smarter, more age-appropriate, more like myself. That doesn’t mean I started spending money I didn’t have by buying expensive clothes. I have written before about exactly where I shop and why, in Where My Money Actually Goes Further (And Where It Doesn’t). What changed was not my budget; it was how intentional I became with it. And it has stuck in a way I did not expect. Even now, unemployed- which is its own story I have been telling honestly in my retrenchment posts– I still get dressed most mornings as though I am heading into the office. It sounds small, but it changes my whole day.

When I feel most like myself, I am usually in high-waisted pants, black or cream, with a white tee or a shirt, sometimes plain, sometimes a colour I have been drawn to. I lean heavily on black, brown, cream and white, and I mix them without overthinking it too much. On my feet, I prefer flats like loafers most days or sometimes flat boots, and I am not really a trend follower. I avoid dressing younger than I am, and I avoid anything too casual unless I am walking the dog or running to the shops, and even then it is not old clothes or pyjamas; there is still a small amount of effort in it.

The flats are not an accident though, and if I am honest, they come with a story attached. I used to wear very high, very pointy heels, back when I worked full time in an office and heels were just part of the uniform. My ex and I were the same height, and wearing heels made me taller than him, which was something he was conscious of, without ever making a big thing of it. He convinced me to stop, partly for my feet, which, to be fair, had taken a real beating over the years, and he was not wrong about that part. But looking back, that is also around when my style started changing in ways that had less to do with me and more to do with making someone else comfortable, and that is on me too, if I am being honest, for allowing it to happen the way it did. It took me a long time to understand what that actually was: a boundary I never set for myself, and it is one of a few things in that relationship that taught me that lesson the hard way.

So when the workbook asks what I wish I could wear more of, my honest answer is heels, not the very high, very pointy kind from before, just something with a small lift, purely to elevate what I already wear. Along with more high-waisted wide-leg pants in cream and white, and more shirts in blue or blue stripe. Right now, with no income coming in, that gap between what I would reach for and what I can actually buy is very real. I know how to make very little stretch. But stretching a budget and having the budget to reach for what you actually want are two different things, and right now, that gap is very real.

This page, My Body, My Comfort, is one small piece of My Capsule Wardrobe, the workbook I built out of exactly this kind of thinking. Comfort, effort, and the pieces I am still working toward- all of it comes back to dressing for the body you have today, not the one I am chasing.