well-dressed

It is a quiet Sunday evening. I am clutching an Xbox controller, leaning forward, and frowning so much my forehead is wrinkling like a pug. I am rapid-firing questions into the air. Everybody in the room is ignoring me.

We, as a family, have become addicted to Dress To Impress, the Roblox game that has been consistently popular since it launched in 2023. I'm going to presume you all know what it is, but in case you don't, it's a game about dressing to fit a particular theme: Embraced by Lace, Black Swan, Get Ready With Me, etc. You have to dash between stations to adjust your skin tone, hair, make-up, and outfits. Everybody parades down a runway one by one, and we rate their looks. This is our favourite part of the game: throwing around criticism in the manner of lesser Craig Revell-Horwoods. 'I like it, but where is the lace?' 'How is that Art Nouveau?!'. Whatever server we land in is at a distinct disadvantage, because I am a mum and have to stop myself from awarding the kids 5 stars out of 5 just for the virtue of once living in me.

It takes me a good while to get used to Dress To Impress.

I sit in the hairdresser's chair looking for braids, and each one I click on plops neatly on top of the other, creating layers and layers of hair.

I keep calling my daughter's name to get her attention. 'Why is there so much hair? What's going on?'

'What?' she says, half-looking.

'There's hair! I want to change the hair but it keeps adding more hair!'

'You have to get rid of all the old hair. You need to click on the button.'

'What button?'

'The one with the hat.'

'Where?! Where is it?!'

And so on.

It's ironic because I am considered to be the tech-literate person in our family. Occasionally my father-in-law will call me with a password-related problem, or something to do with a printer. 'Do you mind if I pop round with my tablet and you can help me sort it out?'

I never mind at all. It's nice to be helpful. The truth is that I don't think of myself as particularly technologically competent. I am technologically confident, which is not the same thing. I don't find password situations at all frightening, just quite annoying. And I'm infinitely more patient and relaxed when someone else is asking me for help; at the very least, I'm less likely to throw something in frustation when my in-laws are around.

But playing Dress To Impress - at least, until I got the hang of things - gave me that feeling of genuine fear and frustration. Faced with a screen full of buttons and no idea what to do. I feel like that a lot when I play Roblox with the kids. For them it's natural. I am the interloper trying to work it all out, feeling strangely wrong-footed, unmoored by the switching of the order of things.

Dress To Impress is fun because the outcome is always different. Everyone interprets the theme in their own way. It scratches my 'I fancy making something' itch. So you can imagine my joy when everyone on my Bluesky feed started talking about Dressmaker, and my deeper joy when Chris bought it for me to cheer me up on a bad day.

You play a newly-established dressmaker serving a range of clients with specific needs. Comfortable, eclectic dress for a picnic? Got ya. Warm, practical dress for working outside? Easy. Wildly inappropriate scarlet satin gown to catch the attention of a man at a funeral? Sure!

You have to follow a series of steps to make the dresses. It's designed to feel similar to the real deal: measure the client, adjust the mannequin, cut out the pattern considering the grain of the fabric, and sew. It's all the fun of sewing without the incredibly stressful bits.

Once, I invited my mother-in-law around for a cup of tea and to teach me how to use the sewing machine she'd picked up for my daughter from a charity shop. I don't know anything about sewing. My parents were not in the slightest bit interested (which is weird to me, because one of my earliest childhood memories is opening up an old Quality Street tin and sifting through mounds and mounds of buttons, all different sizes and colours and weights, like a box full of little treasures. Why, if no-one ever did any sewing, did we have so many buttons?).

I had no idea how to wind a bobbin up beyond pull, pull, clap clap clap. And so my mother-in-law, with the patience of a saint, taught me all the steps. If she felt annoyed at my complete inability to understand what was happening at every stage, she kept it to herself.

The reason why she taught me how to do this was because a) I am helplessly short and trousers are always too long for me, so it would be nice to be able to alter things and b) I like the idea of learning to make clothes. I did try, as a teenager, some hand-sewing; I bought a hideous pink-and-black striped rugby top from a charity shop and reworked it into a halter neck, which I wore to a house party, and then it fell apart in the wash. I've written about this before, but in another life, I was going to be a handbag designer with a little boutique. I would live above my shop and write novels at night. In Paris, possibly. I've always admired the craft of dressmaking but I've never had the time or the patience for the actual doing of it.

It turns out that making clothes is really bloody hard.

It's one of those things that you dream of doing, like learning the guitar, and then don't actually get around to learning because the first hurdle you come across is a bit too steep for you to be bothered to vault over. Every now and then I embroider things, as gifts. I spend about 40% of the time not actually embroidering, but threading needles over and over again, quietly swearing as the thread refuses to go through the tiny little holes.

Of course, it ends up being worth it, even if the results aren't exactly as I envisioned. I can look at what I made with a sense of pride, and, like childbirth, I forget the pain and do it all over again.

Back to Dressmaker. You don't have to forget the pain and frustration, because there isn't any. It's just pure sewing satisfaction.

Similar to Strange Horticulture/Antiquities, you, as a fixture of the town, catch snippets of the action from afar: little conflicts and joys, they come your way in the small conversations you have before and after the actual dressmaking bit. You are in the eye of the social storm; everything is calm behind the doors of your haberdashery. I always think that the storytelling element can be easily overlooked in games like this. It takes skill to paint a picture that is just the right amount of vivid in such small chunks. Debutantes, movie stars, young women possessed by loud and demanding spirits, they all spill details of their lives alongside their commission requests. They know something from you that designers and indie fashion YouTubers understand intrinsically: a good dress can change your life.

I was talking to my friend Jono about life's various activities and how I am often too exhausted to do any of them. He's a wise sort of person. Like an owl. (Sorry Jono, not sure if you'll take this as a compliment or not.) I know I need to exercise, and I know that my favourite type of exercise is dance, but I'm just so tired! All the time! I keep missing dance classes and generally being a sloth outside of work and family life. And he said: 'some is better than none. Maybe start very small? Like "go to dance if I can, practice at home when I feel ok?"'.

He's right! He's so right! Obviously. This is adulthood: hanging onto yourself, your passions, your need for expression in tiny, manageable chunks.

When I did CBT, it was tailored to the fact that I have a really horrible chronic pain condition and how that wreaks havoc not just on my body, not just on my mental health, but also on my actual sense of self. It penetrates all the layers of me (instant regret of my word choice but let's just go with it). Much of my CBT practice was about learning to do what I can, without guilt. Categorising my activities as low energy, medium energy, and high energy, and then arranging them around my pain.

(It was also a lot about letting go of guilt; at one point the therapist just sort of sighed at me and said 'Megan.' in a tone that expressed so much disappointment that I immediately changed my ways, just from the need to not let him down ever again. Is that a strategy that therapists use? To guilt you into doing life properly? Quite effective if so.)

Sometimes, keeping up a vague interest in sewing looks like stabbing yourself in the thigh by accident as you balance on the edge of your child's bed, waiting patiently for them to go to sleep, because you can't get the hang of attaching tubular sequins to a piece of fabric. Sometimes it looks like dragging the sewing machine out of the cupboard and contemplating ringing your mother-in-law just to, you know, tell you how to do it all all over again. Sometimes it looks like opening up Dressmaker and enjoying the feeling of making something, a little glimmer of life underneath the pain and tiredness.

Early on in our sessions, my CBT practitioner sent me a worksheet about the stages of grief.

'I know that you're not grieving a person,' he said. 'But actually, this is a very helpful framework for grieving after a life-changing diagnosis.'

He explained to me that grief, in any form, is not linear. You can leap from denial to acceptance after a series of good days, then fall back into anger and despair when a bad day comes. 'It's not a journey with a destination,' he said. 'You just learn to live alongside it.'

Dipping my toe into the online chronic-pain-condition-world - which I don't do often, because, ironically, it hurts too much - I've realised that any kind of condition like this brings slow losses of the self. Context dependent, but there will be things that you just can't do anymore, at least at the rate you once did. For me those are things like walking on a windy beach without worrying, going out with friends on winter nights, spending my evenings doing fun things sometimes, rather than lying down with a heat pad slapped on my face.

For others, particularly those with disabilities, the losses are larger. The loss of independence is no small thing. I'm thinking about this specifically because the origin story of Dressmaker resonates with me. The creators, partners Sabrina Becker and Jonathan Hau-Yoon, started developing the game when Becker, an IRL dressmaker herself, began to lose the ability to sew thanks to hypermobile Ehler-Danlos syndrome. Is there a way for people who are physically unable to sew to maintain a connection with their passion for dressmaking? It turns out, yes. Becker and Hau-Yoon have created something that is as tangible as a video game can be; the snip of scissors as they fly around the fabric, the careful turning of the dial to adjust the mannequins, the whirr of the sewing machine. It's immersive. You can't hold the finished dress in your hands, but you can come away feeling that you've made something from scratch, something that didn't exist before.

I was browsing on Bluesky recently, desperately trying to dodge bad news like navigating around digital landmines, when I found this post about the top-rated review of dressmaker:

And I won't lie, this made me a bit wobbly. Because isn't that wonderful? Isn't that the pure joy and heart of humanity at its finest? The return of creative passion to a woman who is slowly losing her sense of self alongside her physical ability? This is what games can do. What an absolute gift.

I went digging for other reviews, too. Story after story about the enabling power of Dressmaker. Of the return of creativity to people's lives. Of generational connection.

And, of course, there are reviews like this:

Which are also important.

In the backwards world we live in, many people only start considering their own wellbeing when something starts to go wrong. The pillars of wellness are so obvious when you think about it. Why doesn't everyone know them? Why didn't I know them? Connection with others, exercise, learning new skills, helping others, mindfulness. In my dream world, every person would have a general catch-up with a doctor at least once a year, specifically to talk about those five things. Do you have all of these? Can you strengthen a particular area? And in my dream world, everyone will have ways of accessing these things depending on the level of physical ability they have. They'll leave with a prescription list of how to live. Health will be considered holistically. Everything is linked. The gut connects to the brain, the brain connects to the nerves. We need a way to examine the whole self, to check that everything is in balance.

I think, like a lot of people, I was feeling a sense of lethargy that was totally decimating my ability to be creative. Everything about modern life feels like a determination to stamp the passion out of people. Emails aren't written by people anymore. All leaflets and brochures look exactly the same. Everyone's getting laid off. Everyone's sad. Sometimes I get to the end of the day and I'm so emotionally exhausted that I just want to stare into space and not think about or produce or consume anything at all. Just air.

And then I remembered the high-medium-low energy thing. Sometimes, I don't have low energy physically. I have low energy mentally. I know that learning a new skill might make me feel well, in my mind, but it feels out of reach. I wrote new lists. Like this:

I probably won't refer to this ever again. Once I wrote it down it lodged itself into my brain. For every activity I enjoy - writing, drawing, sewing - there are ways of experiencing it without having to put my whole body into it. Or even my whole mind. The important thing is just keeping that passion alive. Remembering that you don't have to let go of the things you love; in fact, those passions might be the very things that keep you from losing yourself completely.

Anyway. I implore you all to pick up Dressmaker. It's a gem of a game.

This Time in 2025: I talk about an excellent Aurora album in Matters of the Heart

This Time in 2024: I apologise in Sorry, Abigail

This Time in 2023: I talk about the best little guy in Clay Supremacy