I’m not going to tell you that you need to wear makeup. That’s not what this is. But I do think there’s something real in the daily effort of getting yourself looking and feeling a certain way, and that it goes for around the house as much as it does for going out.
You can wear stained tracksuit pants and the same holey t-shirt all day, every day, and technically nothing bad happens. But you also stop feeling good about yourself, and then you act surprised by that. How can you expect to feel good when you’re not putting any effort into feeling good? Even supermodels don’t actually look like supermodels without the effort behind it. What we’re really responding to, almost every time, is effort itself. Nearly anyone can look genuinely attractive with a bit of care put in.
So when we live in the same sweats and stained shirts long enough, we stop finding ourselves attractive, and other people do too, and that’s not some judgment on you as a person. It’s just a reflection of how much you’ve chosen to put into a particular game. And it is a game, with real social consequences whether you opt in or not. That’s not an endorsement of the game. It’s just an honest look at how it actually works.
When I worked as a life coach, sitting with my clients, I’d hear the same thing over and over. They’d tell me they felt unconfident, ugly, stuck, and that they couldn’t find their way back to the version of themselves who used to go out feeling good in something they loved. So I’d ask them the same question every time: what do you actually wear around the house, when nobody’s watching except maybe your partner or your kids?
And the answer was almost always the same. Sweatpants with holes in them. A t-shirt with a stain that’s basically permanent at this point. Underwear with popped elastic. Socks that don’t match. Unbrushed hair, an unwashed face…Of course you’re not going to feel good in that. I’m not saying you need to walk around the house in a corset. There are comfortable options that still look genuinely cute, and they don’t have to be expensive either. Sometimes the whole shift starts with just throwing out the worst of the ratty clothing, so it’s not sitting there in the drawer, tempting you to reach for it again.
Making an effort, even the smallest version of it, even just for yourself, when nobody else will ever know, is still a way of telling yourself you’re worth it.
← Back to the Journal