Surrendering the Skinny Skinny Jeans

I returned home from 40 days of residential treatment this spring to a predicament no one warned me about: my jeans.

I’d spent the last month and a half carefully unearthing my past, examining and grieving it, and then finding it a final resting place within myself. But I’d forgotten about the parts of my past that were hanging my closet.

Most of the clothing I owned was rather old. There were even several relics from my teenage years. My natural frugality said these pieces were perfectly wearable clothes, while my eating disorder lurked in the background scheming a perverse reward system to attach to them. These clothes could help me gauge my “progress.” As long as the “skinny clothes” still fit, I was okay.

Once in a while, when even the smallest sizes had grown loose, I would tell myself that I was done with it all. My body was not meant to be child-sized forever. While I tried to eat more, I placed a moratorium on all clothes shopping until I could fit into a healthy size.

As a result, I rarely bought new clothes.

So when I returned from residential and opened my closet doors for the first time in 40 days, I knew I was going to have a problem.

I spent two weeks wearing oversized shirts and leggings before I told my therapist I was afraid to confront my clothes. An eating disorder veteran, she said that I had to get rid of the anorexic clothing if I was ever to get rid of my eating disorder. She encouraged me to bring some of it to treatment so that she and I could dispose of it together.

So one harrowing evening in April, I tried on each article of clothing to decide which I could keep and which I had to relinquish. My husband helped me through the bouts of tears and mirror-cursing. At the end of the night, I took refuge in a pair of gym shorts.

I saved one pair of jeans and a belt I could no longer buckle, and I brought both to treatment the next day. The jeans had been a birthday present from my mother several months earlier. They were my only new pair of pants that year, and the only jeans that fit. Two weeks into residential treatment, when I struggled for the first time to zip them, they were banished to the bottom of a pile of yoga pants and leggings.

My therapist laid the jeans out on a table between us. A tag sewn into the fabric dubbed them “Skinny Skinny Jeans.” She asked me if I had anything to say to them. I couldn’t muster a single word, being too preoccupied by the dual horror of losing my skinny jeans and of having sunk to the point of conversing with a pair of pants. She suggested that I go home that night and write a letter instead.

So I did:

I read the letter out loud the next day to the stretch of dark denim my therapist had placed on the table again. When I finished, she handed them to me and then led the way out of the building to a trashcan on Park Avenue. I dropped them in and we walked away.

I’ve since bought new jeans.

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