Published by Elle UK
After years of suffering from chronic pain and depression, Scarlett Curtis finally felt well enough to wear something other than her pyjamas, and discovered that looking good and feeling good are more connected than she realised…
For a very long time, clothes were pretty much the last thing in the world I could think about. The wardrobe of someone who is ill, sad, or doesn’t tend to leave the house very much can be a sorry affair. For years I would change, every morning, out of my nighttime pyjamas into my daytime pyjamas to ready myself for yet another day of being bed-bound and in pain, resulting in a nightwear collection that outgrew the bottom drawer and required an entire wardrobe for itself.
If our teens are a practice run for the rest of our lives, a chance to get all the bad outfit choices, alcohol poisoning and painful young romances out of the way before emerging into womanhood with an armour of life tools and nice boots, mine left me entirely unprepared.
At 14, I was left in chronic pain after an operation on my back went wrong. Three years of not being able to walk much further than the end of my road (and it’s not a very long road) were followed by two years of crippling depression and anxiety, which once again flung
me into a petrified, bed-bound state. In a few weeks, I went from being a ‘normal’ teenage girl on a constant mission to see how short a skirt I could get away with and saving up for a new pair of Topshop hotpants (with ‘pants’ being the operative word), to a miserable recluse barely discernible in a puddle of baggy grey clothes.