Issue 01: I Dress Because I Feel

"To express your sense of place in the world is, it would seem, an endless act of translation. A self-portrait is not always a depiction of a body.” 

Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror & The Palette

Getting dressed isn’t the answer to anything. But it’s a question I’m interested in getting lost in sometimes. How do I want to get dressed to be in my days? Often, this exploration can be a fleeting distraction or a simple invitation back to beauty and creativity. Lately, it’s a curious new language I’ve been learning to speak.

I am autistic and have ADHD, a discovery that came late in my life and late in 2023. The past fourteen months have been a swirl of learning, processing, explaining, grieving and trying my best to cultivate a delicate kind of kindness towards myself. Kindness to myself wasn’t here before. I’m learning about it slowly, holding it in my hands for the first time, a porcelain vase I’m afraid I’ll drop, that I want to hold onto so much. I have taken my first bold and shaky steps towards unmasking (in spaces and with people that can provide enough safety for me to do this). It is possible that this will be a never-ending process, forever checking, and checking again, to see what is acceptable and what is not. The fact that masking is sometimes an option for me is a privilege. Devastatingly, for many people, this isn't possible, and the safe places do not appear to hold them when they should.

I feel a lot of tenderness towards my past self for learning so precisely how to mask to keep myself safe. It’s also true that masking in all corners of life eats up your energy, presence and sense of self. 

There is a lot more to say here, another time will be better for that, but I want to say that I think if we can create more spaces where people can safely unmask and be witnessed in their purest form, it can be alchemical, for everyone involved. Masking means there’s a lot that isn’t being shown or expressed that deserves to have wings and a sky to fly against.

An unexpected exclamation mark in this process has been a kind of sartorial unmasking. Is that what I would call it? A better phrase isn't coming to mind, so that'll do for now. I mean that the way I get dressed now is unrecognisable. It's the same clothes really, but the way I wear them feels completely different. I feel like I'm taking on a new form. There's a channel between the internal and external that was closed off before. It could be that I'm not filtering my outfits through someone else's lens anymore. In her moving and generous book Easy Beauty, Chloé Cooper Jones writes "Beauty is what we're told is beautiful and what we're told becomes the truth." I felt an affinity with Chloé's notion of beauty, specifically her fascination with and preference for 'difficult' beauty. I feel increasingly dissatisfied and uninterested in the things I've been told are beautiful or acceptable. I try to actively resist them; they're not mine. Now, the odd and complex pieces of clothing I love, I love more fiercely, and I feel more sure of the weird tincture of ingredients that make up my personal style. Those are mine. 

The more of myself I understand and uncover, the stranger my outfits get.

In the past, I would constantly seek validation and reassurance from the people around me when I was deciding what clothes to wear. There was a deep worry about looking strange or odd, learning early in life that the cost of being viewed and othered in this way was too high. Before I knew I was neurodivergent, I was twisting myself into painful shapes to make other people comfortable, destroying essential fibres of myself in ways that I'm still trying to process and make sense of. Putting an outfit together to go out into the world was the last layer of masking, hoping to belong. 

But I know now that belonging when you're not being yourself isn't real belonging; it's watching people belong to each other, in a room you're locked out of. 

If the purpose of getting dressed before was to create a veil of normalcy and acceptability, now it's a cape of strangeness and light. The storm of emotions and piercing otherness I feel internally, I can't always communicate to the outside world, but I might be able to wear a fragment of it. 

With clothes, nothing is untranslatable. 

Now I dress because I feel.

This is something I'm drawn to in other people too. It's not just that the way they've adorned themselves is fascinating and exquisite (but it is that too), it's that I can feel their desire to work out and express something of their interior world. It's not polished or exact; we're just getting to witness one of the many brief snapshots of their transformation, a lifelong iteration. A visual poem, deliberately unfinished. A swift reminder to us all that none of us really know what it’s like to be someone else. When I see these other others, I make a point to smile at them. I wonder if they know what I mean.

Read more of Sarah's writing on Strange Cape