No. 51: How to Dress When You Are (Not) Yourself // Part One

I feel weird about my postpartum body and that's okay.

I love clothes. I always have. When I was little, loving clothes looked like dog-earing the pages of Storybook Heirlooms catalog, circling poufy dresses and bucket hats with sunflowers in the brim. When I was a little older, I’d get my hands on my mom’s stack of subscriptions before she could reach them and the glossy pages of Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Elle, InStyle and Town & Country had me mesmerized. I’d ration out imaginary budgets and choose one thing I could buy per page. I pulled a barstool up to the teeny white television on the kitchen counter to watch runway shows airing on E! Network during fashion week. Fashion was always top of mind.

My love for clothing and knack for styling seemed to spill out of me and onto others. This meant I’ve always been the one who helped my friends decide what to wear, what to pack, what to get rid of. The thing is, it always seemed easier to dress every body that wasn’t mine. In elementary school, I was head and shoulders above my peers and my body looked like I was wearing a superhero muscle suit from Party City. While all my friends wore matching outfits from Limited Too, I had already sized out and was in the Junior Section of the department store instead.

In my tween and early teen years I was puffy and bloated and strong and heavy. My biceps covered in a thick layer of softness threatned to rip the too-tight sleeves of my Lacoste polos. I dare not size up to accept that I was an XL instead of a medium— a size 14 at age 14. Again, my clothing never looked “right.” I looked nowhere near the girls in the Delias catalog or the Disney stars but also couldn’t fill out a training bra to save my life which meant I didn’t look like the models in the Women’s Department either.

By my sixteenth birthday, I had shed all my baby fat and was left with hips, a six pack, legs shaped by volleyball and track and biceps shaped by Singletary genes. I had moved to California and girls out in the Silicon Valley were just built different. Sure, the majority of people in my school looked like the cast of Laguna Beach, but the athletes? The athletes were a different story. There were a few girls my height and for the first time, even a few girls who were sharp rather than soft like me. But those girls wore Nike sweatsuits and Hollister flares with tank tops as the extent of their fashion. While I was always considered the stylish one, (picture stretchy turquoise guacho pants, a long tank top with lace trim, a gold stretchy belt wrapped low on my hips, a purple cropped cardigan and a headband with feathers on one side. this is the “stylish” outfit I was praised for) I still couldn’t stand my body.