Hobbies can help us heal. We shouldn’t judge what gives a person joy. For you it could be singing in a choir. Or baking cakes. Or rolling down to the skate park to do ollies.
In the throes of what can seem like ongoing hardship that won’t go away doing what we love and that comes easy to us can help us manage and cope with what’s going on. Critics have ridiculed me for being a Fashionista. Yet I’ve always delighted in dressing up.
Frock-n-roll has been the music of my soul. From the earliest beginning when I was a disc jockey on FM radio in college in the 1980s, I have always loved fashion.
The Hermes print advertisement gets at this: “Beauty is a gesture.” How we dress can be a gesture of kind regard and self-compassion.
Coming out of the depression I can see that I’m feeling better when I have the energy and motivation to “shop in my closet” by choosing items to create new outfits. There’s no need for retail therapy.
What we wear is a form of self-expression. It’s like art therapy. Our clothes can be a hug for our body. I dare say that I came alive after I started dressing in the clothes that were the most me. Like in tee shirts and colored jeans in the summer.
How is what I’m writing linked to mental health? My first-ever published article Time to Start Spring Cleaning appeared in January 1990 in the local newspaper’s Women’s Forum column.
In the piece I wrote about doing spring cleaning in January to beat the winter blues and blahs. Advocating for clearing the cobwebs from our heads too—the mental clutter that takes up space and keeps us stuck in the past. Telling readers that when they opened a can of chowder, they could savor a whole new you.
A fan of Marie Kondo and her KonMari™ method of deciding what to keep and what to toss I bought her book Kurashi at Home: How to Organize Your Space and Achieve Your Ideal Life. A 2009 study “found that cortisol levels rise when rooms feel cluttered and that organized homes reduce feelings of depression.” (https://konmari.com/organization-is-self-care/)
Kurashi in Japanese is lifestyle or the ideal way of spending your time. Tidying my apartment sparks joy. The clear space gives me a clear mind. Seeing the overstuffed closet shelves and dresser drawers overwhelmed me. Now the contents are lean, and I feel serene.
Keeping on hand only the clothes I wear and adore helps. Daring to express myself freely through how I dress gives me confidence. After coming down with COVID two years ago I posted a blog entry about how we should not be afraid to wear a hot pink pantsuit. Fashion experts be damned.
A friend gave me a schizophrenic.nyc black magnet with white letters that urge: Don’t Be Paranoid. You Look Great. There’s no shame in having a mental illness. This in the end is the secret sauce: doing what we love can help us recover.
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Author Info:
Christina Bruni
Christina Bruni is the author of the new book Working Assets: A Career Guide for Peers. She contributed a chapter "Recovery is Within Reach" to Benessere Psicologico: Contemporary Thought on Italian American Mental Health.
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