No more leggings. I lost my personal style during COVID and I'm finding my way back.

Hot Girl Protocol 002: I got dressed every day for 30 days, even when I was working from home.

Welcome to Hot Girl Protocol. In this series, I try products, habits, rituals, diets, and exercises for at least 21 days before reporting back with my honest, uncensored review. If you have a drawer full of beauty products you don’t use, a piece of exercise equipment that’s now become a place to hang your laundry, or a stack of half-read books, then you’ll like it here.

Hot Girl Protocol is free to read, but if you upgrade to a paid subscription, you’ll also have access to exclusive interviews and bonus material.

In April, I set out on a challenge to get fully dressed, no sweats, no leggings, no pajamas, every single day, even when I was working from home. I shared the journey on social media, documenting my outfits every day on Instagram and TikTok as a way to hold myself accountable. If you were one of the people watching every day, you witnessed what appeared to be a very simple personal style journey, a girl with a tiny microphone trying on new outfits in her living room. But what happened behind the scenes during the prep was much deeper. I had some big questions to answer before I dove in: why did I stop getting dressed every day? And what do I want my personal style to communicate to the world around me?

During COVID, lots of people picked up new hobbies. For some people that included learning TikTok dances and baking banana bread, but for me it was binge-eating sleeves of Oreos and having daily anxiety spirals. I was furloughed from my job as a retail manager in the beauty industry, so I’d stopped getting dressed every day. I lived in sweatpants and didn’t realize my clothes didn’t fit until I got on the scale in May. I’d gained thirty pounds. I never went back to my old job and began working remotely. I bought more sweatpants. I gained twenty more pounds.

Fast-forward to today. I’m 35 pounds down and freelancing in the social media and marketing space. I usually wear leggings and a ratty t-shirt while working from home, and when I go out, my clothes are just kinda... basic. I’ve been a self-proclaimed jeans and a t-shirt kind of girl, having fun only with accessories and my hair, which is dyed pink. I’ve been feeling the nudge to level up in the fashion department for quite some time now.

After I published the last installment of Hot Girl Protocol, I put up an Instagram story looking for experts to interview for my next post.

Enter Morgan May. She’s an oracle and advisor to the hot, rich, and powerful. She helps women step into their most powerful and authentic selves, mainly through a program called Nice Girl Deprogramming.

Nice Girl Deprogramming 8- week curriculum

In Morgan’s world, the term “nice girl” is not a compliment. A nice girl is the result of conditioning that keeps women weak, sacrificial, and in a cycle of prioritizing everyone else over themselves. So when Morgan popped into my DMs volunteering to be the next expert I interviewed, I jumped at the chance.

Last fall, I joined NGD. I’d developed stronger boundaries and gotten more comfortable with conflict resolution as I’ve gotten older, so I figured I’d deprogrammed my nice girl a long time ago. I joined mainly to support Morgan and to build connections with the other women in the group, but I was shocked at how rattled I was during weeks five and six.

Week five was all about sexuality and desires, with the archetype being the Sacred Whore. Week six was Diva Week, where we shamelessly learned to fill our own cup first before meeting the needs of others. During those two weeks, I felt disconnected from the material and the group. I didn’t feel sexy. I didn’t think I was allowed to be a diva. I thought I needed to lose more weight to relate to the material. Turns out I just needed to go a bit deeper.

Weight gain made me hide my body behind leggings and oversized t-shirts. I didn’t feel sexy, so I didn’t think I was allowed to be seen. And even though I categorized myself as a jeans and t-shirt girl, deep down I knew that’s not who I really am. I’d regularly find myself feeling jealous or annoyed when other women were more dressed up than me. Not showing up as my authentic self, as the bold, colorful person I really am, was resulting in a lot of hater energy in me.

I thought back to a time recently when I was going to dinner with my best friend. She was wearing heels, and I only had flats with me. She asked me if it was okay that she was wearing heels, and in that moment, I realized how we all shrink ourselves to make other women comfortable. A version of me from five or ten years ago might have asked her to change her shoes so I wouldn’t feel underdressed standing next to her, but now I would never dare.

In the past, I wanted other women to shrink to make me feel more comfortable, when the solution was really to make myself bigger, bolder, more me. Why have I been walking around wearing jeans and a black t-shirt when my Pinterest board is full of women wearing funky patterns and statement pieces?

In my conversation with Morgan, we also uncovered how being sexualized from a young age, something that a lot of women experience, was also a contributing factor in my fear of being seen. More recently, I’ve experienced some creepy energy from men while out for my walks. I’ve had men in cars beeping at me and construction workers staring, which makes me want to shrink and hide in my oversized clothing.

But Morgan shared some powerful reframes on how to take negative or creepy energy and alchemize it to your benefit. Any time you’re receiving negative or creepy attention, imagine it being deposited as money into your bank account. Unless you’re in real danger (which is a completely different scenario), choose to transmute the energy into something positive.

There’s something about a conversation with Morgan that awakens a beast in me, so it was the perfect interview to set me up for my 30-day journey. We only scratched the surface on all of this, and I can’t wait for you to hear the full conversation. I’m posting it in a few days and it’s for paying subscribers (so upgrade if you want the sauce).

I almost started the 30 days with a closet purge and a shopping haul, but it turns out skipping that was the best accident. After my interview with Morgan, the rest of March got away from me since Joe and I were traveling a lot. I didn’t want to start the 30 days until I knew I’d be home for a while. After putting off starting for long enough, one day I just went into the closet and found an outfit. Things I usually saved for my once-in-a-while trip to an office or special occasions, even things I’d deemed unflattering, were all hiding in plain sight.

I started day one with a Playboy t-shirt I got at PacSun three years ago with leopard print jeans. Even though the outfit isn’t “dressy,” it was still out of my comfort zone. I loved the t-shirt when I bought it, but it still had the tags on. Every time I thought about wearing it in the past, I envisioned strangers laughing at me, thinking chubby girls should not wear Playboy logos or something dumb like that. The jeans felt daring, like I was drawing even more attention to myself, and they weren’t the most flattering on the lower belly. Even though I didn’t feel super comfortable in the jeans, it was great to experiment with a large-scale pattern and led me to finding a pair I like better.

I ended up feeling so cool in this outfit.

I knew myself well enough to know I needed external accountability, so I posted my outfits online every single day. It wasn’t for growth or views. Nothing went viral, and it definitely didn’t help my following (lol). It was purely for commitment. The internet knew I was doing this, so I had to show up. Some days I really didn’t want to get dressed, and I did it anyway. And because I was showing up every day, I didn’t want to repeat outfits, so it forced a creativity I didn’t know I had. It was also kind of like exposure therapy, because my fear of being seen was on steroids when posting outfit videos for thousands of people. I’ve been posting online for as long as I can remember, but it was rare that I would show my full body. I’d been too traumatized from a handful of fat comments I’ve received in the past.

I was 14 days in before I needed to go shopping. At that point, I really had nothing to wear. Even my mother agreed that I had “no clothes,” because every time she saw me, I was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt. I didn’t buy many pieces, and some of them were relatively basic, but I was slowly starting to feel more like me. The true me. The me I want to communicate to the world.

[You can find links to some of my favorite pieces in my ShopMy.]

And I really was communicating to the world. For years, I’d felt invisible, and that was safe, but I can’t deny that a big part of me hated it. I’m a Leo rising. I have pink hair. And at this point, I know I like being seen. Getting dressed every day meant finding excuses to leave the house, even when I was working from home. I’d never received more compliments from strangers, and I was being treated noticeably better by customer service people.

Because I was sharing on social media, old friends and people I hadn’t spoken to in years were reaching out to tell me how much I was inspiring them to get dressed more often. The weirdest part: men were checking me out for the first time in nearly a decade. Of course, that comes with some complicated feelings, but I mostly thought, “still got it.”

The negativity was very minimal. I had some unsolicited opinions, but I guess posting my videos online lent itself to that sort of thing. I had one friend completely roast me over a funky pair of checkered pants I love, and another share her disgust over my footwear choice. She really hates flip-flops. And you can always count on my opinionated Italian mother to let you know if she thinks an outfit is unflattering.

But I thought back to Morgan’s reframe: take the energy, transmute it, and don’t let it send you back to the black t-shirt. Plus, if I want to dress boldly, visibility is part of the deal.

My style journey is far from over. I think getting in the habit of doing it was the first part. As of writing this, I’m nine days out and still haven’t gone back to my old ways. I get dressed every day, even when I’m working from home.

I think the next part of my journey will be amping up my personal style even more, while also figuring out how to dress cute in the unbearable summer heat. Living in central Florida has been quite a learning curve.

I’ve learned that warmer colors are better for me than I thought. I’m looking forward to experimenting with burnt orange and rosier pinks. I’m surprised at how much I enjoy boho vibes with an edgy twist. I’m unapologetically millennial. I’ve rediscovered my love for skinny jeans and Converse.

And inspired by my conversation with Morgan, I’m excited to try a more multiple-personality-disordered approach to style: different archetypes, different vibes, a different woman every day.

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If you’re interested in what it’s like to work with Morgan May, I highly recommend watching her free masterclass, Deconstruct the Nice Girl. You can also follow Morgan on Instagram and TikTok.