Help! There’s An Existential
Crisis In My Closet

That nutritional sludge for people who eat to live rather than live to eat was a perfect analogy for my approach to dressing during the panny. I was pragmatic, practical, efficient. Taste didn’t matter. I wasn’t dressing to be seen or to attend or to impress or to seduce or to delight anyone (not even myself). I was dressing to go from my bedroom to my work nook, or to a weekly hang with the same friends I always saw. But the chief function of putting on these jeans was to defend against depression: pop my Wellbutrin, put on Soylent pants, repeat for an endless beige slick of days where my focus was always on surviving but not thriving.

But then. But then! In spring it became possible to believe we were entering a thriving time. It felt possible that days would be less repetitive, that dressing could return to fun. Friends talked about parties, bar backyards hinted at plans to stay open on hot nights til 4am. People sent me wedding invitations; others shared that they were planning on getting out there to fuck like their life depended on it. I, a 35-year-old woman, suddenly felt compelled to go to a music festival.

The vibe of things are happening again percolated. I felt the dress code change. And…it made me truly, suddenly, intensely, ridiculously anxious. I was ready to dress, but had nothing to wear. I found myself paralyzed in front of my closet, wishing a tiny freak fire would rip through just one section of my apartment and incinerate only my clothes so that my renter’s insurance would say, “Here is money for new clothes,” and I could start all over again.

Reentry into society felt like an opportunity that I didn’t want to squander, one we so rarely get in adulthood—like going to summer camp or a new school or returning after summer vacation. You can walk in a new person, and everyone accepts it without much commentary. Then, it was easier to flow right into a new identity. We’re so much more elastic in youth. The last time I had this chance it was the summer before sixth grade, when I went to Limited Too and was permitted to buy three new back-to-school outfits that would determine the fate of my junior high personality, and seemingly beyond. This summer, I thought, was a chance to put distance between myself and a difficult year: to buy clothes that made me feel as soft as I had been but as hard as the world I needed to be protected from.

For so long I had been excited by the prospect of having reasons to get dressed again: to be seen. The energy with which some people dreamed about a meal at their favorite restaurant and would painstakingly try to recreate it in their home kitchen is the same energy with which I was building online carts for “occasion” clothes. Some nights I would get super stoned and go through my closet to make outfits, pretending I was my own paper doll. I’d bought those blue snakeskin Dries van Noten boots on sale—I needed to figure out what they’d look like with beige pants or jean shorts or with a mini-dress. I got sick of that game when it became increasingly obvious that fantasizing about what party I would wear something to was detrimental to my well-being. But I started doing it again as the vaccine rollout began in my city, plotting with my friends about what a “summer of sin” aesthetic would be—what would we wear, where would we wear it, who we would find to take it off. The thinking would go something like:

I realized I was being dramatic—this existential crisis is probably the symptom of a problem I will continue to avoid in therapy, but I also am a little convinced that I could dress for the summer I wanted, or at the very least, to reclaim the social self I hadn’t exercised in some time.

A month after I’d been double-pumped full of vax, a stray spring day happened. I clocked that summer teaser Friday as an opportunity to fucking go—by which I mean, sit at a civilized distance from friends in a bar’s backyard until 10pm. Here was what I had waited for: a reason to put on something hot, and friends who would say “I love that dress,” or, “Your ass looks great.” It felt like a relief to my paper-doll self. I got a fresh blow-out. I showered. I stood in front of my closet ready to grab something amazing and: I had no fucking idea what to wear. I realized I couldn't remember who my clothes were for. Who was I when I put them on, and who did I want other people to think I was when I wore them?

It feels like now, after this proclamation of need, there’d be a cinematic montage of me trying on outfit after killer outfit, a la Cher’s get-dressed-for-a-date montage in Clueless. The whole thing would end with me emerging having figured out my lewk, and never missing. It would end with me having dressed my way into my best self, in some victorious tableau of thriving in a backless silk dress or something. I hate to disappoint; the truth is that I’ve bought twelve dresses and sent back ten. I wore some new platforms out into the world, and fell so dramatically I pretended to twist my ankle to mask how deeply I injured my pride.

At this time, I have come no closer to solidifying an identity via clothing, but instead have been gently letting myself dress to withstand the whiplash of re-entry: building a wardrobe that lets me dress to savor being noticed by people one day, wanting to hide the next. But I realize my need to dress so dramatically different than I did sixteen months ago is a need to vanquish this fear that I went through a whole-ass pandemic and didn’t change as a person at all. Perhaps a mini skirt, where I would have worn a midi, or a neon when I would have worn black, will be enough to reassure myself I did. It’s a wardrobe of preparedness, assembled to withstand what I predict will be a truly erratic time in which only one thing is certain: the Soylent pants will remain in a garbage bag buried at the back of my closet. Never to see the light of day or the curve of my ass ever again.

Allison P. Davis is a writer in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Cut, New York Magazine, The New York Times, GQ, and California Sunday. She’s currently working on a book, Horny, about the complexities of being a woman trying to get it in. Also, she’s selling a pair of platforms, worn once.