[293/365] the worst ways to make a clothes shopping list

[cosmolinguist]

Tuesday night I found myself wondering Does "casual dress code" for this work thing mean I can turn up in a hoodie and corduroys? This is how I realized that I don't actually have any work-appropriate sweaters.

Starting my transition during lockdowns and shielding, and working either from home or for other trans people, means I'm only slowly and haphazardly masculinizing my wardrobe; there are definitely still important gaps in it!

(For the record, the room the work event was in was warm enough that I didn't need a hoodie or a sweater, and wearing a t-shirt instead of a button-down shirt put me in a minority but not disastrously so.)

Walking back to the tube station after that work event, though, when I got rained on so hard it gave me a little anxiety attack (my eyes stung and hurt so much from the rain that I couldn't see at all, which is scary when out in public, never mind in a part of London I'd never been to before)... I also realized I needed a proper winter coat.

I've been wearing a Doctor Who one that I inherited from mother_bones, who'd been gifted if and didn't wear it. She said its like David Tennant's coat which makes sense because I'm forever getting compliments on how it looks but it's absolutely useless: it doesn't have outer pockets, it didn't even have buttons until I asked her to add some, but even then the buttonholes are in such ridiculous places so it didn't even keep me dry... I just need a new coat.

Today, I booked a trans-friendly session at a gym for tomorrow morning! I haven't been back to the gym since before the pandemic started, but before that I had gotten a lot out of going to yoga classes and swimming with friends and messing around on the gym machines without much of an idea what I was doing.

The combination of not feeling as good about swimming during covid, those friends having gotten accustomed to going swimming elsewhere without me, not being sure what happened to my gym membership, not being sure of what kind of exercise would be good for me or how to do it, feeling like the gym I went to had never been great about accessibility and now it's further away to walk to, and gender stuff have made quite the obstacle to going back to the gym. I've never been able to manage it.

But last weekend a friend said he'd been to this. A small session (good for CO2 numbers, hopefully) with a personal trainer (good for not knowing what to do, hopefully better for accessibility as well) that's only for trans people (so my boring gender thoughts about myself should be much less of a problem) seems so perfect in almost every way.

There are only two downsides: first that it is so trans-specific that I can't bring diffrentcolours with me as a combination carer/fellow person who has similar hurdles to exercise. But he has very kindly said he'll drive me there tomorrow anyway, as the other downside is that it's held in a part of the city that's awkward for me to get to on my own. Anyway I always prefer not going alone to someplace that's brand new anyway. And for a thing that, ridiculously, feels so momentous, it's probably also good to have him in particular with me in case of extra Feelings, because being overwhelmed never ends well for me.

Only once I'd jumped through the hoops to ask for an account, have it approved, and register for this session at the last minute did it occur to me, belatedly, that I do not have the appropriate clothes for this at all. And I don't mean appropriate in the sense of like "will I look fat in this" or "does this match." I mean I don't have any gym shorts any more and you can't go to the gym in your underwear, heh. Luckily, D has also found a few options of things he can lend me so I should be fine for tomorrow, and I guess I have to add "gym shorts" to the list of clothes that I need to buy!

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Hope the gym is the kinda place where they care more about your relationship to exercise than what you're wearing.