by Luba Palter, MFT

Wearing (choosing) clothes is a form of storytelling. Analyst Jean Petrucelli agrees. In her article, What is in Your Suitcase? Clothes, Compulsive Shopping, and Packing Communicate the Unspeakable (2023), she points out that clothes serve as a form of self-representation - a type of second skin - a bridge between the internal and external. Clothes can conceal, reveal, serve as a political statement or a creative outlet. From the start of the pandemic when people’s movements were restricted, before vaccines and before it was common knowledge how the virus spread, my job handed out essential worker stickers to its employees just in case the police stopped us, we could show our permit to be on the road. I remember feeling scared and terrifyingly out of control that I could not protect myself or my family. Petrucelli goes on to state, “An uncontained body becomes an unmoored mind and clothing choices can be used to express this lack of cohesiveness, as well as compensate and contain.” And so, I leaned into my essential worker identity and started wearing hospital scrubs to work. I remember my mother saying to me, “You need to wear something that you can wash over and over, and you will not care what happens to it.” Scrubs it was. An influencer on Instagram shared that she dressed herself based on multiple identities that categorized her outfits. She picked clothes daily out of which identity she wanted to display that day. During the thick of the pandemic, my choices were scrubs at work or sweats at home. I leaned into essential-worker or a person-seeking-coziness personalities. Those became my defining identities for roughly 2 years.

As the pandemic evolved, as my body changed, and as the world continued to rage, I began to feel too confined within these two selves. I often turn to beauty when the world feels overwhelming. I found myself buying vintage herringbone pattern blazers, long linen shirt dresses, and striped shirts. I became obsessed with Breton shirts in all colors. According to Petrucelli, clothes can represent potential play spaces where the wearer can test out possible new identities. At some point, it became apparent that a patient needed to see me in person. This allowed me to develop another identity, therapist-goes-into-the-office-to-see-her-patient-face-to-face-during-pandemic. This new identity created an opportunity to try out who I could be and not be at the same time as I experimented with various combinations of my newly acquired clothes. And as Petrcelli asserts, “When we adapt and assimilate to the demands of new environments in ways we only before imagined, we are providing ourselves a chance to begin to be.”

And so, without being naughty, what are you wearing and who are you being? Write to me at lpalter@ncspp.org.