In doing this whole modesty thing, I've already begun to run into a number of challenges. I've found myself imagining what I will do once the year is up. Some ideas I have considered include maintaining a level of modesty that involves pants, exposed collars (but no cleavage), exposed elbows (but no shoulders), as well as a number of alternatives in between such as see-through sleeves.
I am very curious to see what I think about this in a week, a month, six months. I will probably have a change of heart here or there, but I absolutely refuse to give up. I will dress modestly for a year, but I will not do so blindly. I will acknowledge all the feelings I have toward it, and respond to them.
Sometimes, when I get stressed or it is hot outside, I get overheated. Apparently, if the past couple of days have been any indication, I am going to be running into this problem a lot over the next year. I can only push my sleeves up so far, pull my skirt up so high. So what can I do to get the quick cool-down? A couple of useful tricks that I actually began doing about a year ago! One is pretty obvious--get hair off the neck! Put it up in a ponytail, sweep it off to the side and over one shoulder, whatever! The back of the neck is extremely sensitive to coolness, and so it is a quick and easy way to literally chill out. In addition to getting the hair up, run hands under cool water and place them on the back of the neck. Rather like touching someone's neck with icy hands, this will make your body feel a lot cooler.
My other technique can be a lot more challenging, and requires not hair ties or cold hands, but a little bit of patience. Whatever is stressing me out usually seems to increase my body temperature, and forcing myself to relax, breathe, and let everything slip away is a surefire way to lower that temperature. I have found that this actually also works in hot weather!
I'm really surprised at how the modesty thing is affecting me. Last night, I honestly could not bring myself to wear pants to bed, so I made myself a skirt out of my little sister's old bed sheet (not pictured...haha). I really think that this trip to Goodwill is going to have to happen soon--even with the 10 or so modest skirts I own, it is hard to match them to a modest top and still be fashionable. I also do not want to run into the sleep-skirt issue again. Perhaps I'll invest in some really awful looking nightgowns....
Note--this is the second appearance in two days of the orange bandana. This is not due to any misunderstanding with regards to who needs to cover their hair (ans: married women), but simply because I enjoy the way it looks. :)
The first day of work since I began dressing modestly. Initially I had planned on accepting the fact that I had to wear pants at work. I would wear a skirt to work, clock in, change, work, change again, and clock out. Then I decided, after doing a bit of reading on the internet about women and wearing pants, that I would feel much more comfortable wearing a skirt that covered my knees--and happening to have pants on underneath.
To expand on some things I might have said earlier, I can't remember, I want to clarify exactly what is or isn't okay. I went into detail on my other blog (see A Modest Mitzvah) about what is or isn't okay for a modest Jewish woman to wear. I didn't really discuss pants much, and as you can see, this issue has come up. The whole thing about not wearing pants stems from the instruction that women should not don men's clothing, and vice versa. Of course, the Jews recognize that as times have moved on, pants for women became more common, until they began making them specifically for women. These days, depending on the rules of ones community, a woman may or may not be able to get away with wearing loose, non-sexy pants.
In any event, I wore this outfit (san-bandana) to work on Sunday, and got no comments about the skirt. Success! I can both respect the work safety policy and express my religious freedom at the same time!
This is already beginning to present a challenge. I don't have a lot of dressy, modest clothing, let alone white dressy, modest clothing. I see a trip to Goodwill will be in store for me (ha ha), but unfortunately not before Yom Kippur.
Some Jews observe the tradition of wearing white only on Yom Kippur, while some others will wear white both days (as I do), and still others don't wear white at all (generally, this last category doesn't even know about the tradition). I went to Rosh Hashanah services at my university's Hillel with my brother, and we both wore white. A peer commented to him something along the lines of "nice white, wrong holiday". For all of two seconds I contemplated feeling silly, before remembering that one could wear white both holidays. Not only that, but my wearing white actually made me feel more connected to the holiday. Rosh Hashanah is probably the second most important Jewish holiday, after Yom Kippur. Forcing myself to find appropriate white clothing caused my thoughts to dwell on where exactly I was going, more. What exactly I would be doing there.
I also wore the tallit and matching kippah that I got when I became a bat mitzvah. While I only wore the tallit during services, I proceeded to wear the kippah throughout the rest of the day (yes, I went to a class...)
On an utterly unrelated note, I believe that this year, rather than detailing what I'm wearing in each outfit, I will try to spend more time writing about the daily implications of said outfits.
