Hi alyahB_,

I’m sorry to hear what you are going through and I have experienced similar feelings and thought patterns.  Are you in a position where you might be able to start seeing a therapist to talk through some of the feelings and stresses that you are experiencing?  To me, it reads that you have had a lot of struggle and difficult times in your life, and for a very long time, you have always had to be the strong one and didn’t necessarily have anyone to lean on.  You were able to be so strong and resilient and get through these difficulties by treating yourself well and having clothes that made you feel that your outsides matched your insides– strong, put-together, tough, can get through anything.  Yet at the same time, since you had no choice but to power through many of these situations, it’s possible that you were never really allowed to feel your feelings in a true way or to let yourself be hurt and vulnerable.  It sounds like there are many old feelings that are piling up and haven’t really been left in the past like you may have thought they were.  This is what happened to me and I had the same feelings of suddenly being “gross and disgusting” and felt like no matter what I wore or what I looked like that people would suddenly see me as looking nothing like myself.  For me, this is still something I struggle with, but I have started to realize that I needed to address my feelings and past traumas with love and compassion and find a way to share those things with others instead of minimizing the past and pretending it didn’t happen.  It really sounds like you have been through a lot, and you deserve your love and support.  You deserve to be treated well, you deserve to have the clothes you want, you deserve to have compassion and understanding for what you’ve been through.  If you are able to start offering these things to yourself and seeking out help, you might find that you slowly start feeling that you lose that feeling of your clothes being disgusting and old.  I still have days where I feel disgusting or that my clothes don’t make me feel like I used to.  But I also realize that I have so much trauma and unfelt feelings in my past (specifically shame) that are making me think that my clothes or my belongings are my problem.

To answer your question directly, no, it is not shallow to want to look your best and to feel that your outside presentation matches your internal experience.  I think this is something that had served you well in the past and helped you get through many difficult times.  There is nothing wrong with this.  Perhaps the new way you are feeling though suggests that you might need to take a deeper look at your own feelings and start determining the type of things you value in life and what aspects of your personality and character that you really love and how they make you you.  If you can feel more grounded and present in who you are regardless of the clothes you are wearing, the more confident you will start feeling and might start realizing that you can be comfortable in anything.  Once you feel that grounded and rooted in your own personhood and being, you will find that that positivity and confidence comes from within you.

To leave you with another quote as food for thought, I have always carried around with me a French proverb, “L’habit ne fait pas le moine.”  Or in English, “It is not the clothing that makes the monk.”

Best of luck!

I’ve been homeless. My children and I had to sleep in our storage locker. I thought nobody there at the storage place knew but it turns out the guy there new were in the locker, he was just kind enough to look the other way for that night. But we never told anyone we had to sleep there.