I hate jeans: the tale of a complicated clothing relationship

I hate jeans.

I hate them. I feel like they are strangling me. Grabbing my body, grabbing at chunks of me, encasing me in a denim prison.

I rarely feel comfortable in them because they don’t feel like a friend who is wrapping you in a warm hug, they feel like a stiff hug from a stranger. The arms of someone you don’t know who feel foreign and unkind, not warm and secure.

I don’t like how they feel on my body. Like my body is not meant for them.

I am not alone in this feeling about jeans, but other people like them, they prefer them, they rock them on a daily basis. And I salute them and their affinity for denim, but denim and I do not have the same love story.

My denim love story was often filled with heartbreak and tears. At the beginning it was about finding a denim I liked, that I looked good in, that I felt supported by. But it was also tears and anxiety and angst as I chased the size on the tag, looking for a smaller and smaller size. Crying when that size I once coveted no longer could slide over my hips was the next stage of the love story, the beginning of a toxic relationship. Then it was further upset when I would have to squeeze into jeans, fighting a button, ripping a seam, feeling like my body was bad because it didn’t fit into the denim cage.

I bought larger sizes, but the shame followed. I held onto all the old sizes, like a box of old photographs of happier memories with an ex. A memory of times when I felt good enough, when I let the smaller sizes define me. But instead it held memories of not feeling good enough in that smaller body and not feeling good enough in this slightly larger one.

So during the pandemic I broke up with jeans. I pushed them aside and told them I was done fighting to feel good in them by making myself smaller. I swaddled myself in soft pants and pajama bottoms and let my relationship with my body heal. I kept the toxic ex-jeans in the back of my closet, improving myself and waiting to see them again when I was ready.

The pandemic ended and I faced them again, in a better place mentally and in a larger body physically. I bought ones that fit me, I threw away the toxic exes, and I reminded myself that my body was worthy without them. That they didn’t define me, that I am more than a pair of pants.

So today, I still don’t love jeans, I prefer the comfort of a legging, but jeans are no longer the enemy that I vehemently fear, now they are just jeans. Jeans that I wear, in sizes that fit, and that don’t define me. Sometimes it still feels like they’re strangling me, but they no longer suffocate me or my self worth.