The Politics of Comfort
A new (to you) essay about my journey with disordered eating and embracing leggings
I’m going to share an essay I wrote in 2019. I never submitted it to be published anywhere, so aside from reading it at The Porch’s live Heartbreak Happy Hour in early 2020, it has lived a solitary life in my G-drive. If you like this essay, I’ll link to similar essays at the end that have been published and are free to read online.
Real quick disclaimers for 2019-me and her language around fatness. Y’all, I didn’t know yet. I was a recovery baby when I wrote this. I’m now in fat positive and fat liberation spaces and use the word “fat” as a neutral descriptor. We all start somewhere and this essay is where I started. I hope you enjoy it.
The Politics of Comfort
Finding out you have an eating disorder when you’re in your forties is...confusing. One on hand, you’re ecstatic, thinking I don’t have to think about this anymore! This being your weight. But on the other hand you panic, thinking, Oh my god, what happens to my body when I don’t think about this anymore? The pickle on top of this shit sandwich is the directive to quit wearing clothes that make you feel uncomfortable. For me, this is a very specific item of clothing: jeans.
Jeans are a young woman’s game. They’re for the influencers who spend their days in a cubicle and their weekends being photographed in front of murals. They’re for the girl with the chutzpah to pull off thrifted jeans from the nineties, before they started making them with spandex. You know these girls. We all know these girls. Their sorcery lies not in their ability to convince you that these jeans will look great on anybody, but in their ability to make you forget that they are twenty years younger than you are.
I don’t mean to imply that I was a coal miner in the late 1800s, but I was around at the beginning of jeans. I moved to New York City after college. My roommate worked at Barneys, and not just any old job at Barneys - she worked in Star Services, the personal shopping service Barneys offers its celebrity and high-profile customers. Her favorite thing to do was come home and tell me what size jeans she pulled for celebrities. Gwyneth Paltrow? Size 25. Karen O from Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Size 27. Jeans were so popular that Barneys was building a denim wall. She told me I should come in and try on a pair and if I wanted them, I could use her discount. The first chance I got I took the N train uptown to 59th Street to see this denim wall.
A lesson on “whiskering” and $125 later, I had my first pair of designer jeans. Despite being a few sizes up from Gwyneth, I was thrilled with my new 7 for All Mankind, low-rise, boot-cut jeans. Watch out, New York, baby’s got her blue jeans on.
It was 2001 and the beginning of my love affair with designer denim. No matter if I was going to a warehouse party in Williamsburg, a blind date to Planet Thai, or a Vogue magazine party that I begged someone to put me on the list for, I was wearing jeans. The jeans said, I don’t take myself too seriously, but I can afford to shop at Barneys. (I absolutely could not afford to shop at Barneys.)
This is a look, and a style motto, I kept for over twenty years. I wear jeans every day, with the exception of summer when I’ll throw on a caftan if it’s too hot. Jeans are my signature look. Most days you can find me in jeans, a tunic and an expensive clog. Am I comfortable? No. My high-waisted, size too small, Madewell jeans cause me to lose kidney function every day around 3:00pm. But do I look pulled together? Absolutely. Listen, I walked upwards of ten miles a day in stilettos around Manhattan for years. I’m not about to let a little temporary organ paralysis stop me from living my best denim life.
Like many women I know, I am sometimes perplexed by what I look like in pictures. I’ll see a picture of myself in a yoga class all stretched out with perfect posture and think, Wow, is that what I look like? I look great! But then I’ll see a picture of myself I didn’t know was being taken where I’m slumped over, wearing one of my favorite potato sack style tunics and think, Oh my God, is that what I look like?. For a lot of people, this is normal. For me, it’s body image distortion, and I have to see a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian (CEDRD) to help manage it.
I’ve been seeing a therapist for the past five years, working through heavy topics like trauma and lighter topics like why I hate all my friends. Also in heavy rotation, my weight. In fairness, when I started seeing my therapist I was training for a Half Ironman and actively losing weight. Because this is a culture that celebrates thinness, in those early appointments, I held up my weight loss as the one thing I was doing right. I imagine even back then, my therapist knew my relationship with my body needed to be addressed, but there were so many other things higher on the priority list that it kept getting pushed to the back burner. Then I turned forty.
When I turned forty, it became clearer what I wanted to spend time and attention on, and my weight wasn’t on that list, at least, I didn’t want it to be. Try as I might, therapy appointment after therapy appointment, I kept lamenting about my weight. My therapist drew a line across a piece of paper and then turned the paper to face me and asked, holding her pen at the far left side of the line, “Here. You’re ten years old. Do you think you’re fat?” I said yes, and continued to say yes as she went across that piece of paper covering every decade of my life. She eventually went past my current age and asked if at fifty and sixty, I want to feel fat. No, no I did not. “Well,” she said, “then you’re going to have to do something between now and then to change how you feel about your body.” So we started working on it, and it did get better. The volume on my ‘You’re Fat’ voice went down substantially over the next two years. My business grew, I was writing more, I felt okay.
A sixty dollar visit to a grocery store doctor’s office changed all of this. I had to get a biometric screening for insurance and had the humiliating experience of being told by a tall, thin, young nurse practitioner that I’m “obese” and “pre-diabetic”. I now know the absolute buffoonery of implying a woman’s health is related to her weight or BMI, and that it takes three months of testing done by a doctor to diagnose someone as diabetic (Google how pre-diabetes has been rejected as a diagnostic category and called scaremongering), but in that moment, I didn’t know and I was ashamed. It was this brief exchange with a grocery store nurse that landed me in a Registered Dietitian’s office because when I told my therapist what happened, she said, “Enough. You’re going to see someone.”
Would you believe that after twenty years of ignoring hunger signals from your body that you’re, oh, I don’t know, not in tune with your body? Turns out, living a life of dieting comes back to bite you in the ass, your ass that’s the exact same size it’s always been, by the way, because DIETS DON’T WORK. Where’s my I’ve been on a diet for twenty years and all I got was an eating disorder t-shirt?
In a conversation about feeling self-conscious, my nutritionist helped me realize that sitting all day in too-tight, high-waisted jeans makes me feel terrible about my body. After some follow up discussion about sizing, shopping and self-harm, she asked, “Why don’t you wear leggings?” “As pants?” I asked. “Yes, as pants,” she replied. Leggings, huh, as pants.
I give off strong visual cues. Never ask me to play poker. If I don’t want to accept something you’re telling me, involuntarily, my whole body moves backwards. When she told me to try wearing leggings instead of jeans, I leaned so far back, I hit my head on her gallery wall of diplomas. Leggings? As pants? What am I, a woman in her forties? A woman who works out every day? Someone who works from home and only ventures out into the public eye once, twice a week, tops? I am all of these things.
Leggings feel like giving up. Leggings say, look, my emotional makeup is too complex for a denim waistband and a zipper. Above all, leggings say, fuck you, I’m comfortable. I’ve dipped in and out of, I daresay, every trend since 1976 and never once have I participated in ‘comfort fashion’. Fine, there was that one year in the eighties when long sweatshirts and stretchy stirrup pants were in, but that’s it! I need my outfit to tell you who I am, and trust me, I am not, nor have I ever been, comfortable. We don’t live in a culture that promotes comfort for women, unless you can afford Eileen Fisher. We live in a culture of jumpsuits, the antithesis of comfort as you cannot use the bathroom while wearing one. A culture of corsets disguised as high-waisted denim sold to you for the very comfortable price of $150.
The thing about paying someone to help you live your life better, is that you should try following their advice before weeble-wobbling out of their office in your too-tight jeans, middle fingers in the air (in an effort to send more blood to your kidneys). After agreeing to try wearing leggings, I arrived at my next hurdle: what leggings do I buy?
In the year of our Lord, 2019, I took my quandry to social media and ran a poll asking my Instagram followers which leggings to buy. I was dismayed by how many recommendations for control-top, tummy-tucking leggings I received. Diet culture is everywhere, folks. Stay woke! I wanted to scream, I am too emotionally compromised for control garments! But I didn’t scream. I went online and bought two different pairs of leggings.
“Why don’t you think you deserve comfort?” my therapist asked as she helped me wrap my mind around becoming a person who wears lycra to business meetings. There’s no good answer to this. There’s the obvious answer of a lifetime of messaging, magazines and television commercials telling women what to be - skinny, pretty, friendly, good at blowjobs - but never comfortable. Even Oprah, who gives people free pairs of cashmere pajamas, wants you to eat cauliflower pizza and join Weight Watchers, oh, I’m sorry, WW. If Oprah’s not on my side, then who is?
Back in 2001, I used jeans as a personality safety net, a way to say, you may not like me, but you’ll accept me because I’m wearing the same jeans as Gwyneth Paltrow. They were my way into situations I didn’t have the confidence to be in otherwise. Jeans were my armor. Maybe they still are. I find myself reaching for those kidney-killing Madewell jeans every time I’m heading into a pitch meeting with a potential new client, or a birthday party at some bar I’ve never heard of where I want to give off the vibe of being a cool, 36 year old as opposed to a comfortable, 43 year old.
I eagerly await the time in my life when I can “give up” and not spend thousands of dollars a year keeping my hair blonde, buying serum, which no one can tell me the benefit of, waxing my entire face, and wearing jeans that cause me physical pain, all so that I can trick people into thinking I’m five years younger than I am. Are leggings the DeLorean time machine of fashion? Can $50 of lycra transport me to a future where I’m allowed to be comfortable?
If you’d like to read more of my writing on this topic, I’ve had a few essays published that I’ll link to below. They are all online and free (no paywall) to read. If this is a new-ish topic to you and you’d like to learn more, get thee to the work of Aubrey Gordon.
Here are my three published essays:
Watch Out for the Big Tears (This one didn’t age well. Whoops!)
I loved this, of course! More, please. 👏🏼
I'm so glad to read your writing, Kim, and thanks for putting this vulnerable piece out there. It's so dense and packed, I'm going to have to sit down later and read it again!