#also I’m rereading the story again and I want to teach literature again soooo bad oh my god | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

whentherewerebicycles · 2 years

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my dread levels are sky-high this morning and I know exactly why: I am already freaking out about clothes for tonight lol. I went and reread this Woolf short story just now and am struck again by how exquisitely it captures the unbearable agony of picking out an outfit for a social event, feeling excited or positive about it, and then arriving to discover that the outfit is utterly Wrong and humiliating and bad, and you by extension are also wrong, humiliating, bad. total emotional meltdown that snowballs into a total existential meltdown. this is so relatable to me that I have to laugh aha even as I also claw at my face because SO RELATABLE. like I feel this in my BONES:

I have this memory of being in middle school and shopping for dresses for the first last & only school dance I ever attended, and I just had a total silent meltdown in the dressing room and then sobbed all the way home and said to my mother WHY CAN’T WE BE BRAINS IN JARS I WISH WE HAD NO BODIES OR CLOTHES I WISH WE WERE BRAINS IN JARS. these days I have largely moved beyond my ‘wish to be a brain in a jar’ phase but all it takes to plunge me right back into it is an unfamiliar social situation where I don’t fully understand the dress code or the framework of expectations through which other people will interpret my clothes. really makes me feel like I am losing my goddamn mind and also my grip on reality & on my own identity lol. I wish we all wore sacks I wish we all wore uniforms I wish we were all brains in jars communicating via electrical signals

#the only way to master this is to decide well in advance what I am going to wear and then to allow absolutely no deviations from the plan #like I must be absolutely fixed in my mind and absolutely unwavering #i am leaning towards the dress and tights with a cardigan to dress it down #because I think it is better for my emotional state to be a little overdressed than a little underdressed #but we will see. i am doing laundry and then I am going to try on one alternate outfit (jeans and nice tshirt and cardigan) and decide #i already know I do not have the right kind of top #which is why I am leaning towards the dress #also I’m rereading the story again and I want to teach literature again soooo bad oh my god #that opening passage is six sentences! and look at how much it conveys!!! you have this unbelievably rich and nuanced understanding #of who this person is and how she’s situated in the world and how she perceives herself and how others perceive her and how bad the meltdown #is going to be!

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