I finally bought jeans that fit the body I have

I spent one entire Saturday afternoon in a fitting room in March and came out with one pair of jeans, and it may have been the best-spent afternoon of my year.

Here’s what was happening before that: I owned four pairs of jeans. Two fit the body I had at thirty-two. One fit the body I keep intending to have by next spring. The fourth actually fit and I wore it constantly and felt vaguely guilty every time, like I was settling.

The afternoon

I took fourteen pairs into the room. I want to be honest about how that felt: not great. Fitting room lighting is a hate crime and I cried a little at pair number six, which was a size I had never bought before, and which fit.

The number on the label described the jeans. It did not describe me. It took me until forty-four to fully believe that.

Pair eleven was the one. Straight leg, high rise, mid-wash, nothing special — a style that has existed for fifty years. I bought them. Then I went home, took the other three pairs out of the drawer, and put them in a bag for donation before I could reconsider.

What changed

• I get dressed in about two minutes now. There’s one pair. The decision is already made.
• I stopped doing the small hourly adjustments — the waistband tug, the sitting-down shift — and I hadn’t realized how much attention that was quietly eating.
• I bought a second identical pair in June. No notes. Highly recommend.

It cost me an afternoon and about ninety dollars to stop having a daily argument with my own body. I would have paid considerably more.