Hi Erika,
Thank you for putting language to this so carefully. What you described landed as recognition, not theory, and I think that's why so many people are responding from different angles without talking past each other.
What stands out to me is that you're not describing "winter clothes are bad," or worrying about how strangers read you. You're describing something quieter and more internal: the way you read yourself. The mirror, your reflection in a shop window, the silhouette you catch in peripheral vision, the way fabric moves on your body—these aren't vanity. They're confirmation.
They're how you know yourself throughout the day without having to consciously check.
Winter interrupts that feedback loop. Layers designed purely for function mute movement, shape, and texture for months at a time. The cues that anchor you in your body go quiet.
For someone whose sense of embodiment was hard-won over fourteen years, that silence can feel less like an inconvenience, and more like something meaningful has been taken—even when nothing has actually changed about who you are.
What makes winter especially tricky is that it doesn't erase femininity so much as it expresses it differently. Summer allows femininity to be visible, kinetic, immediately legible through skin, silhouette, and motion. Winter asks for a quieter grammar—detail, intention, texture, color, weight.
When your sense of self has been anchored in visibility for a long time, that shift can feel destabilizing, even when femininity is still present.
"Sundress prison" works precisely because it's yours—a shorthand for an experience, not a category anyone else is required to inhabit. That kind of self-honest language often opens doors for others to recognize something they've felt but never quite named.
A few thoughts on living with this:
What you wear at home isn't just comfort—it's maintenance. If most of your winter hours are spent indoors, that's where embodiment lives. Thermostat up, dress like it's July. Let your home be the place where the dialogue with your body continues uninterrupted.
When you do have to go out, winter doesn't have to mean shapeless and invisible. Bright colors, beautiful sweaters, long necklaces, bracelets, rings, jeans and nice boots, scarves chosen with intention rather than just warmth.
You can bundle up against the cold and still leave absolutely no doubt—to yourself, and to anyone who happens to see you—that you are the person you're looking for in that reflection.
The moment of unbundling can also become its own quiet ritual. Not just relief from deprivation, but a small daily return—something to notice and appreciate rather than simply survive until spring.
Fourteen years full-time means you're not wondering if you'll ever feel settled. You know what settled feels like. That's exactly why this stands out—you have a baseline to compare against.
Winter disrupting that doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means you've built something real enough to miss when it goes quiet.
The dialogue with your body doesn't stop in winter. It just gets softer. Noticing that softness is different from losing the connection entirely.
Warmly,
— Susan 💜
