Personal Style & Chronic Illness

How they affect and influence each other

Since last week’s post was about what I wore in NYC, I thought it would be fitting to chat about how my chronic illness affects my personal style. I have always had a special interest in fashion and style (fun fact: I, for a while, wanted to be a fashion magazine editor), and I like to think of myself as stylish. I love shopping, I love getting dressed up, and, to me, there’s nothing more empowering than feeling good because you think your outfit rocks. My mother taught me since Day 1 to get dressed even when you’re sick (or at least wash your face or brush your hair or change out of your pajamas into something equally as comfortable) because the physical act of getting ready makes you feel better mentally.

I’ll share the evolution of my style in another post, but I know it’s gotten really relaxed in the depths of my healing from Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I don’t have the energy to care. My energy is finite, so I have to choose what I’d rather spend my energy on: emails or picking out a cute outfit to wear at home that likely no one but me will see. And then factor in the tactile pain from having anything with a zipper or button digging into my internal organs, and then I wonder if I’m actually doing my body harm by rallying myself into clothes to make me feel better but that hurt (not that they’re not the right size, just hard on my sensitive body) because there have been instances when the pressure from having a seam press into my hips flared my joint pain and the back of a button burrowing into my stomach gave me a stomach ache.

Also factor in that I work from my bed and it’s not comfortable to sit in bed in jeans or a dress or a skirt and it looks rather silly to wear sweatpants with a blouse, and besides, I’m cold all the time, so wearing a blouse would only make me colder, and I spend a decent amount of time lying on the bathroom floor doing multiple coffee enemas a day, and then you get my everyday uniform: sweatpants with a sweatshirt and no makeup.

If you happen to encounter me while I’m wearing said uniform, you probably wouldn’t gather that I value personal style. This makes me sad because it’s not a true representation of who I am. You can learn so much about someone by what they wear, but that’s not the case with me. When we were undergoing our bathroom remodel a few months ago, I don’t think our contractor thought much of my style until we traded Instagram handles and I watched his eyebrows go up in an unfiltered flash of disbelief before he caught himself, remembering I was standing right next to him.

An outfit I feel like really epitomizes my style: relaxed preppy with a Parisian flair.

When I get dressed up to shoot content, I’ll often take my makeup off immediately after and change right back into my sweats. I have a closet and dresser bursting with beautiful clothes I barely wear. Sometimes, when I’m dressed up and am trotting around town, I’ll catch my reflection in a store window or mirror and think, “You look so good, so put together, so normal… so stylish. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you weren’t hurting from being in those jeans or having your shirt tucked in like that or wearing those shoes or having your hair pulled back in that clip?”

A example of when I looked in a mirror and liked what I saw but then had an existential thought of what if I dressed up all the time and liked what I saw all the time?

How can I still have personal style if my chronic illness dictates my lifestyle?

To start, what is my personal style? It’s not feminine or masculine (though I love oversized button downs and silhouettes) or edgy. It’s casual but not overly casual. It’s a little sporty. I’m inspired by Parisian fashion and elevated classics. I like neutral colors with shades of green and maybe some blue-green here and there. I don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my personal style. I’ve asked several friends to describe my style to them. And one word everyone said that encapsulated everything I just described to you was “preppy.” Which at first came to me as a surprise because when I think of preppy style, I think of popped collars (yes I did this when I lived in CT), Jack Rogers sandals, and pink and green as a color scheme. But then I sat with the word for a bit and realized that yes, I am preppy. Preppy is Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Jane Birkin, Princess Diana, Joan Didion, Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn, Coco Chanel, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, and occasionally Hailey Bieber—all of whom I consider to be style icons. Preppy is my thrifted Liz Claiborne cardigan, my Prada loafers, and my beloved vintage sweatshirts embroidered with the names of cities, museums, or athletic clubs.

A recent favorite outfit I wore.

How can I bridge the dichotomy between my personal style and my chronic illness?

I took this conversation to the Substack chats, and had several insightful responses, two of whom gave me permission to mention them here.

Susan SH said, “I think one thing is what we wear out of necessity (in your case) or out of habit (in mine) and another is who we are inside. Maybe you are not a sporty girl at heart, but rather a girl who respects herself, her illness and her body, who has priorities and who is healthy. That can mean leggings out of necessity or baggy pants from The Row. I think that is where the difference between a sporty girl and a comfortable elevated girl is being marked. In my case, I am not very sporty, but very very comfortable (many of my winter shoes are sneakers). Celebrate life and play with your comfortable clothes, and kick all the bad beliefs that surround you.”

Michelle F said, “As someone who also lives with multiple chronic illnesses as well as a very strong family history of cancer which contributes to my overall fear that at any moment things could get even worse, I can deeply relate. Many days I don’t change out of my PJs and when I do it’s usually the same few outfits on rotation—anything that I can do to reduce the day’s cognitive workload.”

After all that analysis, I don’t really have a conclusive answer for you as far as how to dress how you’d like if it’s a burden to your illness. What I’m working on is my mindset. Sure, I don’t look how I want to look most days (I’m writing this while wearing a pair of unbuttoned loose fitting trousers on my bed with a heating pad on my stomach for my stomach ache and a gray sweatshirt with a coffee stain on the sleeve from when I misjudged my pour, but I’m about to do another coffee enema after this, so it’s not worth changing), but I’m learning to disassociate my symptoms from my personality (and, in this case, personal style). My symptoms are a part of me, but they are not me. I am not my symptoms. I am not the sweats I wear every day. I know who I am, and I know I have good style—Instagram can serve as the documentation of that. I know I can dress up if I want to, but I know that I do the more important thing: honor my body and give it what it needs.

Till next time.

xx
Micaela