This year is kicking my ass. As a white, middle class, able bodied human lucky enough to still have a job with a regular paycheck and benefits despite the half dozen plagues that have visited us this year, I feel lame even saying the year is kicking my ass. On the other hand, as someone constantly distracted by the failing health, social service, childcare, and education infrastructures all around me, it is goddamn hard to stay focused on work. My conscience–fully cooked for the first two dozen years of my life in the deep fryer of midwestern guilt and foreboding–never lets me forget that I need to be a good, hardworking ant, not a whimsical grasshopper, OR ELSE. At the end of the day, burnout is real and sometimes my brain muscle is just too exhausted for another rep at the ole brain gym that is my work. Enter the rabbitholes.
There have been so many since the beginning of all of this, but none quite so powerful as yoga pants. When the work from home thing happened, nothing but yoga pants adorned my legs for at least 90 days in a row, and they still do about 90% of the time. For me, the rise of yoga pants in my life came alongside another powerful force– cottagecore, that lovely “aesthetic” (as my teens call it) full of soft natural light, gardens, home-baked bread, comfy cardigans, ramshackle fisherman’s cottages, and basically the Doen lookbook from any given season.
I should probably mention that I actually know next to nothing about cottagecore. All that I know about cottagecore I absorbed through the cultural ether, meaning my kids and my sister in law who keep track of cool stuff.
Even so, cottagecore– or, my idea of what cottagecore is at least–is the gestalt of my 2020 coping strategy. I roast vegetables. I bake. I make kombucha and sauerkraut. I garden. I sew crazy quilt squares. I imagine a future life that involves a small cozy home in the desert, or the olympic peninsula, or somewhere quieter and much cheaper where HOAs are banished and where I can have too many animals and am surrounded by loving people baking bread and making homemade candles and not working 60-80 hours a week. I take that vision and make some of it real in my everyday life, and this is how I keep my monkeymind in check every once in a while. In this land, I wear the shit out of some really comfortable yoga pants, and have fully convinced myself that skintight pants with VPL on a middle aged woman is charming. Of course, this led to much, much time spent searching for the perfect yoga pants. While friends settled for a perfectly great three pack from Amazon, I could not! I had to have the very best, most comfortable, perfect ones for my personal bastardized cottagecore vision! I tried many kinds, largely by purchasing on poshmark or ebay before committing to full price. (Side note: this was actually a terrible strategy because then I could not return them and am never actually going to re-sell them, so I am left trying to pawn them off on my kids). Outdoor Voices were too stiff/scratchy. Prana were too thin/stretchy. A Reebok pair has a weird thing at the back waistband that hurts when I lay down in them. I combed through reviews on Everlane and Nordstrom but couldn’t commit.
Then, I found them– Girlfriend Collective. The cheesy name almost put me off. But the diversity of models on the website– people of every glorious size, shape, and background– got me. The Poshmark sellers would not bargain with me, so I ordered a full price pair, knowing it was a giant gamble. And for once I tasted rabbithole glory– all of my searching, review reading, visiting and revisiting the GD website, it all paid off. In a way I hate that it did because, like a mouse rewarded randomly with a pellet for pushing a lever, the intermittent reinforcement will only keep me going. At this very moment I am wearing wool socks, yoga pants, a giant t shirt, and a giant chamois shirt I stole from my good natured dad over 20 years ago. It is outfit perfection, and today I sorta don’t care if I never have to put on actual clothes again.
rabbit holes and remorse 