I have this recurring nightmare. I am trying to get dressed to go somewhere. Usually a date, or a date-like event. The boy I really hope will become the man I really like, is waiting in the next room.

And I can’t get changed.

I can’t decide what to wear. I want to look sexy but not too sexy, pretty but attractive. I want to get and keep his attention. I want to make sure he’s not staring at the tits of the woman sitting next to me. I want to make sure he thinks I’m the most interesting person in the room, the way I think he is.

And I can’t decide what to wear. I can’t decide what clothing screams ‘I really like you, but also I’m classy, but also I have my life together, but also I’d be willing to jump into bed with you at a moment’s notice if you said you wanted me.’ There is no clothing on earth that says that. And so I choose the closest thing. But when I try to change into the outfit I’ve selected, I can’t do it. I already have too many clothes on underneath.

The clothes underneath are the ideas I already have about who I am. Some of them are bullshit ideas, like that I’m not good enough or smart enough or kind enough or loving enough to deserve to be loved the way I want him to love me. Some of them are real and worth holding onto, ideas like that I shouldn’t have to hunt for a shirt that walks the impossible line between ‘sexy’ and ‘slut’ or that if this guy really objects to me not paying fifty bucks to get my eyebrows plucked professionally, maybe he really needs to date someone else.

I am the kind of person who keeps on buying clothing. I have cheap fleece jackets and expensive scarves. I have shirts from activities that I really thought I would enjoy, but did not. I have shirts from jobs working for somebody who really loved what they were doing, and I pretended to do the same so they would take care of me like a replacement parent. I have spent a lot of my life trying to be good enough to earn the affection of a replacement parent.

I spent years buying clothing I could not afford, stacking it up like a barricade between me and the rest of the world. Whenever I got a new job, I bought new clothes to match my new identity. I thought I could start my life over that way. But always the same thing happened — I outgrew the job. I got a handle on the power dynamics and the lies and the casual everyday callousness, and I started pushing for changes I was in no position to make. Then I quit or got sick or Covid intervened, and I moved on to the next thing.

Friendships too. I think I have viewed every new friend as a potential savior from my parents. That is no way to begin a friendship. It has led to a series of deeply emotional and codependent encounters with other women I did not respect or have much to say to. This I suppose is toxic femininity. I blame myself for every fracture in my life and others, and I try to fix it. I am a martyr disguised as a saint, but I think underneath that I am someone trying to be a hero. In my own story, yes. But not just my own story.

Every real adult is a real hero to somebody. Women are not taught how to be that. We are taught to stay small, shallow, neurotic, safe. We are taught to flee from the more polluted aspects of this life. To believe we can’t cope. To think if we can’t hang with difficult men, then we also cannot work alongside them.

That makes for some pretty utopian ideals. But I don’t want to live in a utopia. I don’t want to live in a perfect world, or try to find the perfect relationship.

And I don’t want to keep on looking for the perfect article of clothing. The one that will keep me safe retroactively from my parents. That will signal that in spite of being traumatized to despair, I am not yet defeated. Still struggling on. Still deserving of love.

“What is loved, lives,” Diane Duane wrote. But maybe, what is living, what is truly living, is also what is worthy of being loved.

At any rate. No ideal wardrobe exists. Maybe I am still wearing too many clothes to go out there on that date with that boy. But maybe I am also responding to feeling judged, or feeling inadequate. Maybe there are no clothes I could ever find that would convince him I am the right kind of girl. Because maybe the kind of girl he is looking for is the one who would have no previous ideas, either about herself or the world around her. Maybe he is looking for a girl who will be like a barbie doll, somebody he can dress himself. And I will never be that kind of girl.

Maybe instead of trying, I better learn how to tell him-in my own clothes, my own hair, with my own words-I better learn to tell him that I really don’t want to go with him after all.