The Best Thing I Did in 2022 Was Get Rid of My Pants That Didn’t Fit
I’d feel bad about my pants no longer fitting; then I’d feel bad about feeling bad and stress about the expense of buying new jeans. No more.
Ask the ExpertsLifestyle
Is this because I’m 30 or because of the pandemic? is a question I found myself asking a lot in 2022. Did my sciatica decide to flare up one cold November day because I worked one hour too many sitting in a non-ergonomic chair, or because it realized “oh, we’ve been doing this for three full decades now”? (Jury’s out.) Did my nose start breaking out because of some secret third hormonal shift no one warned me about, or because I’d gotten in the habit of wearing the same mask for too many days in a row? (It was the mask.) Did my body change in certain ways because my daily routine was pretty drastically altered nearly three years ago, or because that’s just what bodies do as we age? (Would love to know the answer to this one.)
And while I love to pontificate on the cause, the effect is the same: How I carry my weight now is different than it was three years ago. As such, many of the jeans I wore then do not fit me now. There were moments where that wasn’t true, and I held on to these pants for those few days every couple of months where some combination of factors allowed me to button them without deep physical or emotional discomfort. But those times were few and far between; what usually happened is that I’d absentmindedly put them on every other week, remember they didn’t fit right, and be in a foul mood going into whatever it was that required me to put on hard pants. I’d feel bad about myself for no longer fitting into them; then I’d feel bad about feeling bad and stress about the expense of buying multiple new pairs of jeans. Then I’d be angry at society for making me think I should be smaller, but also at capitalism for encouraging me to just shop my way out of a problem, and and and…