> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jessicavanlevens.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Defiance in Getting Dressed - URL: https://www.jessicavanlevens.com/defiance-in-getting-dressed/ - Published: 2026-08-09T03:23:37.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-09T03:23:37.000Z - Description: This morning I fought for my life, and then I got dressed. Not dramatically. Not with ceremony. - Author: Jessica van Levens This morning I fought for my life, and then I got dressed. Not dramatically. Not with ceremony. I pulled on a pair of black activewear pants, the buttery kind that read as intentional rather than defeated, and a white t-shirt I made sure was crisp before I put it on. I rolled the sleeves. I wiped down my sneakers until they were spotless. I added a Ralph's Coffee green baseball hat at the angle that felt right, a few easy bracelets, a pair of studs, and then I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, yes. That's closer to it. There was an upper respiratory infection sitting in my chest, the kind I carried home from a week in Key Largo like it was part of my luggage. My autoimmune system was announcing itself the way it does, loudly, in every joint and under every nerve, the infection tipping over the first domino in a sequence I know by heart now. My body had decided, as it often does, that the cost of living would be collected immediately upon return. Getting out of bed that morning was not a small thing. It was the kind of effort that exists before language, before the day has any texture at all, in the pure animal register of just continuing. And then I got dressed anyway. I want to be careful here about what I'm saying, because I'm not interested in the kind of story where illness becomes the villain and a cute outfit becomes the triumph. That's too clean, and my life isn't clean, and probably yours isn't either. What I'm describing is something plainer and more stubborn than that. It's the choice, made without fanfare and sometimes without much feeling at all, to remain visible to yourself. To not let the hardest mornings be the ones that decide who you are. Nobody warns you how much of a self turns out to be maintenance. The armor, for me, is never the most elaborate version of myself. On the days my body is loudest, I don't have the bandwidth for much. No makeup, usually. Nothing that requires significant effort or decision fatigue. What I reach for instead is the put-together version, the clean lines, the thoughtful detail, the outfit that says I considered this even if the considering took thirty seconds. The ritual is in the finishing — the jewelry clasped, the hat settled, the bag chosen — because the ritual is what tells my nervous system that something intentional happened here. That I am still a person who makes choices about how she moves through the world. There's a math to it that I don't think healthy people ever have to learn. On a flare morning everything has a price, and I'm running the numbers the whole time: hair or makeup, never both; the shirt that needs ironing is disqualified before I finish the thought. So I've gotten precise about which details buy the most feeling for the least effort. Rolled sleeves are free. A wiped-down sneaker is nearly free. A good hat solves more problems than it has any right to. The outfit that looks effortless is, in fact, ruthlessly efficient, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can pay it. I think there's a particular kind of neurodivergent exhaustion that looks, from the outside, like not caring. The inward-turning that happens when your body and your brain are consuming all available resources just to keep the lights on. The social withdrawal, the simplified wardrobe, the weeks where everything feels utilitarian because you simply cannot. And I understand that, I have lived so thoroughly inside it. But I've also learned, slowly and with some resistance, that the simplified wardrobe doesn't have to mean the abandoned one. That clean and considered is its own language. That a spotless sneaker is a complete sentence. This is not about being pretty. It's not about performing wellness for anyone else's comfort. And it isn't vanity, whatever that word is supposed to accuse me of, because vanity needs an audience and most of these mornings no one sees the outfit but me. It's about the specific dignity of looking in the mirror on the hardest morning and finding someone there who still has opinions about sleeve length and hat angle. Someone who reached for the good bracelets even though her joints ached. Someone who refuses, even on a Tuesday, even in a baseball hat, to be entirely consumed. Maybe you know her. Maybe you are her: the woman whose body and mind work against her with something that feels almost like dedication, and who keeps choosing herself anyway, over and over, in increments too small for anyone else to notice. Who will not let being sick strip her of her style, of the small strange particulars that make her unmistakably herself. Who is more closed off than she wants to be, more turned inward than she used to be, and who gives herself permission to let her personality show up on the outside on the days it can't show up any other way. Her illness takes enough. It doesn't get her taste. The outfit speaks when she can't. It says: still her. Still choosing. Illness takes a great deal. It is patient and comprehensive and it will take more if you let it. What I have learned to protect, with a stubbornness I'm actually quite proud of, is this: the part of me that cares how I look. Not for the looking. For what the caring means. For what it says about who is still in here, still paying attention, still refusing to fully disappear. And none of it is settled. Defiance isn't a decision you make once and get to keep. It gets chosen every morning, from scratch, with whatever the day has left you. Some mornings that's buttery black pants, a clean white t-shirt, and a green hat. Some mornings getting dressed is the bravest thing I do. This morning it was.