Fitting In and Standing Out – Are You Willing to Dance in the Rain of Self-Expression?

I grew up in London.

I had to wear a school uniform until I was 16 which was actually really helpful in terms of reducing the daily panic about what to wear.

But I felt it – both the pulse of “Am I fashionable?” and the pulse of rebelliousness – towards society, expectations, and my parents. I even actuated that feeling by buying a belt in the early 90s with the word REBEL in brass. I still wear the belt and honor the concept as both a verb and a noun.

I saved up for a year for a classic black leather biker jacket when I was a freshman in high school. With a pixie cut (as a result of a summer of dying my hair 4 colors and swimming in chlorinated pools), 501s & my black leather biker jacket I wanted to look like George Michael in his “Faith” years. I was deeply upset when I was misgendered – and somewhat confused by it because I have hips and a small waist! I am now confident in how I express myself & identify as heteroflexible.

I remember discovering the ability to personify different identities with thrift store shopping as a young teen – which we called going to the Charity Shop in 80s and 90s London. I found this delicious raspberry suede jacket, with gray fur at the collar and hemline. I blew most of my allowance on it & still have it! Putting on a piece of clothing that feels so markedly different is an energetic stance that I play with around archetypes. I put on the “jacket” of the archetype when I want to embody a particular energy in a situation.

My clothes tell a story of my relationships with others.

What I remember most about my clothing purchases – which are often tied to travel, people, and special moments – is how they made me feel. One of my favorite jackets is an awesome 1970s ski jacket I bought in a vintage store in the Marais, Paris in 1996 because it wouldn’t zip over my fellow backpacker’s massive chest, but luckily would zip over my more modest rack! I can still remember her frustration and eventual sigh when she saw how it fit me like a glove and my first deeply contented awareness that having smaller boobs was actually a boon!

I realized when I was relatively young that I had a certain energy that people would orient towards. I couldn’t articulate it. My grandmother called me sunshine – she was a remarkable human who experienced being orphaned, being abused, being helped to run away, becoming a WW2 nurse, having a 60+ year romance with my grandfather, extreme physical trials living in Africa but ALWAYS re-orienting to and from the power of love. 

She was witchy in the best way – “darling I would have been burned at the stake if I had been born 400 years ago.” She was psychic and feisty & as her firstborn’s first born she and I had a bond that was unlike anything I have experienced with any other human.

Her love and belief in me (and all her family) and her ability to see things before they happened gave me – a child raised in an intellectual home of a psychoanalyst & educator – the ease of dancing between the worlds of science and magic. I knew how to be noticed by playing with my energy – I could increase or decrease my energetic presence. I knew how to hide or disappear by playing with my energy. And as a young person, I ascribed a lot of that to my clothing, not to my energy. 

Now I recognize their subtle interweaving. How I dress is intimately tied to my energy.

During the pandemic I decided to break a multi-decade mindset about my legs: that they were functional but unshapely enough to not be available for public consumption when bare (unless I was swimming or they were swathed in leggings, stockings, etc). 

This mindset was affirmed by a deeply loving family member who, when I complained about my “tree trunk” legs as a teen said, “You have a lovely face, and it’s much easier to hide your legs than your face.” It was meant with love. I took it as proof that my bare legs were probably best hidden. I became a master of long flowing skirts, flirty long dresses & of course knee high boots & thick tights!

Summer 2020, I raided the Tupperwares of old clothes from my kids, grabbed a few pairs of old jeans my sons had outgrown, and chopped them into shorts. And then I started walking around my neighborhood. And I felt the breeze on my legs. 

Oh, the joy – the breeze on my bare skin felt so amazing. I hadn’t walked around in public with my legs bare in decades.

And when people looked at me, I smiled back, inhibiting my desire to apologize for wearing shorts (hello conditioning)!  One day it was raining. 

It was fall 2020 and the realization that COVID wasn’t going anywhere soon was thrumming through the news, the social media outlets I followed, and the fact that I hadn’t seen my family in England for nearly a year (we usually go about 3 months). The human toll was sitting heavy with me. My family was struggling. But, I had committed to walking 11,000 steps a day. 

And I decided to embody the energy of one of my most beloved friends Harri who has a quotation that she lives by: 

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.

I put on shorts, and a rain jacket and danced around the streets of my neighborhood. Oh – and the response I got was so lovely – cars honking at me, people smiling at me. It felt like a good day.

What I now know is that for me there is a divine chemistry between how I dress and how I show up energetically.

When I am wavering in my emotional state, but am going into a space where I want to show up as myself, in all my glory – I like to be seen and am intentional in my dress. Summer 2023 I pushed that to the extreme by going to a big LGBTQIA+ summer gala event dressed as Madonna in her gold cone bra outfit era. And I rocked it.

As a young person, I would often dress in such extreme ways—green velvet tailcoat, top hat made from paisley print, striped leggings, Doc Martens or fishnet stockings, wedge-heeled platforms, flared denim A-line mini-skirt, an old shirt of my dad’s knotted at my waist—that my mum would ask me to walk 30 feet away from her because I looked so crazy. 

And what is so funny about that is that I took it as a point of pride – like YES – I had so deeply created a look that made NO sense to her, but made deep sense to me and my energy body.

When I started getting on more stages as a speaker, I hired someone to help me sort out my clothes and figure out some key outfits for traveling as a speaker. My clothes fell into three silos: workout, mother of active kids, and wedding-funeral clothing, none of which I wanted to wear on stage! This required me to get over another mindset – that spending time and money and energy on how I looked was vain, not worthy, indulgent. I grew up in a home where my mum cut my hair, and I was encouraged not to wear make-up. That WHO I was on the inside was way more important than WHAT I looked like.

Traci did a few things that were really interesting. 

First, she dug into my style, getting clarity on the fact that I was never going to be a black pantsuit with loafers kind of person!

Second, she did a skin tone analysis to tell me which were my color tones (super interesting – I had been doing a lot of that wrong). 

Third, she told me that a lot of what I had been mostly wearing for the last few decades was wrong for my body shape (think leggings, long boxy tops, boots – hey I grew up in the 90s – that was a staple look)! She told me to wear things with small tight waists to emphasize my hourglass figure and told me to wear skirts/ shorts above the knee or at the ankle so my leg length was emphasized.

Since this wide-legged jean look has come back into fashion, I have tried on these jeans in all price ranges and kinds of stores because I LOVE how they look on people and I am nothing if not persistent. But every style/ brand/ leg length I have tried on looks the same. The widest part of my legs – my thighs – are exaggerated and I look crap.

In the past, this would have made me feel fat/annoyed/fill in the negative self-talk word.

Now, I revel in the fact that I don’t FIT into the current style. Why? Because style comes and goes, and I KNOW what suits me now. 

And, because I know that the chemistry of what I wear with my energy is really what it’s about. So working on my energy is one of the most vital parts of this whole process.

I love my body. 

I love how I dress.

And I know how it elevates what I do and how I show up in the world.