Don't Ask Me About My Jacket

I am from California. I grew up in the Bay Area in Northern California, where winter means the lawns and fields are covered in a light layer of frost on the coldest mornings and you can expect any December afternoon to be a sunny 60°F. Now, I fully embrace all of the jokes about Californians not understanding seasons and I can recognize that I will never be good at adapting to colder weather, but I still get embarrassed when I leave my New York City apartment wearing a heavy jacket and see someone walk by comfortably in shorts or a skirt. 

I am emotionally attached to my oversized black denim jacket, even though it isn’t made for temperatures below 50°F. I own an incredibly nice wool coat and a very warm puffy snow jacket, but I would rather stand in the wind howling down Broadway for an hour than be more bundled up than everyone around me. I even went out shopping during my very first winter break from college specifically to buy as many turtlenecks and layering leggings as the stores had in stock so I could hide the warm clothes underneath a casual sweater and jeans. Until now, only my closest friends knew that I wear two pairs of socks during the winter to keep my toes warm inside my converse sneakers. I’d like to think the FIT students would be proud of how well I’ve taught myself to layer clothes without getting so bulky that I can’t move properly, especially since my time spent asleep drops dramatically with the average temperature in the later months of the year, as I have to wake up earlier and earlier just to make sure I have enough time to pull on all the precious thermals and turtlenecks that I desperately hope will keep my body heat trapped against my skin. And, if none of that will work to keep out the cold, I would rather suffer through the shivers and speed walk to my destination with my head down to hide the cold-air-tears. 

I’ve never given myself the opportunity to find out if this anxiety is valid, but I can hear the condescending voices in my head asking me “aren’t you warm in that coat?” or proudly telling me “I grew up in the snow so I could be wearing a t-shirt and feel totally fine right now” as I glare at them over top of the thick scarf covering my face. The fact that I love how I look in beanies and took up crocheting a couple of years ago means my ears have often been saved from getting tipped in ice every time I walk to class, but if I believed I wasn’t a hat person I’m sure I would have pulled a Van Gogh and removed them out of pure stubbornness by now. I wish I could say I truly don’t care what other people think of me and that I always dress in whatever makes me feel the best, but the pure embarrassment of not being able to maintain a livable body temperature through natural bodily processes alone is enough to make me sacrifice comfort. 

Luckily, I know I’m not the only person that feels this way. In high school when our marching band had practices late into the night during competition season, there would always be a couple of freshmen who needed to borrow from my stash of extra jackets in the trunk of my car because they thought they wouldn’t need to grab a jacket on the way out of the house that morning. My mom started putting my dad’s jackets in the trunks of each of their cars so that when my dad inevitably started shivering in the evening she could tell him she told him so and then fix the consequences of his stubbornness. I know the shame of dressing for the proper weather goes the other way as well, especially for people who absolutely refuse to be seen in shorts or a skirt during a hot, humid Manhattan summer day and have instead learned to hide the pure exhaustion that comes with being dressed too warm on an already sweltering day. 

It would be fantastic if I could say that all this introspection into why I refuse to wear a true winter jacket during winter has inspired me to pull out the wool coat for the first time since I bought it three years ago, but I know myself too well. I also wish this could be a more uplifting article, reminding you that no one has any right to make you feel bad for dressing for your body’s unique reaction to the weather, but I am a bad motivational speaker and, honestly, I doubt a college student’s rambling would really convince anyone to break such a deeply ingrained habit so easily. Paying attention to clothes and fashion is one of the best ways to quickly learn about what matters to a person and what they think about themselves. When it starts to get cold out, I become more acutely aware of the fact that what I wear reveals a lot about who I am, even in passing to strangers with a keen eye. I guess my new question to think about any time I leave the apartment should be whether my refusal to wear a jacket sends the message I hope it does about my ability to handle a little wind chill, or if the force with which I stuff my hands into the pockets of my oversized black denim jacket makes it obvious that I’m just trying a bit too hard to seem ‘cool.’