"The end better be freaking nigh."

This message sailed into my texts via a group chat last week followed by a link to a piece in The New York Times. Naturally, I figured some new atrocity had befallen the world, another violent geopolitical disaster my shriveled raisin brain would be forced to comprehend against its will and capability. If not world war, perhaps our United States government had been overthrown by a pack of bullies on low-riding bicycles with razor blades stashed in the party portion of their mullets. Perhaps a TikTok goblincore influencer had been named president pro tempore of the Senate. Maybe Florida, at long last, had broken off into the ocean.

Imagine my relief when I clicked upon a photo of Kendall Jenner without pants. My friend's request for the apocalypse simply stemmed from a fashion advice column by Vanessa Friedman titled "Is the Pantyhose-as-Pants Look a Real Thing?" My chest felt light. My eyes were clear. This I could handle!

A reader asked about the trend of stars wearing sheer hose in place of pants. Was this the next ludicrous fashion foray? Friedman replied:

"It's true: Pantyhose (one of the most unappealing names for a garment ever invented) have been on the rise for a few seasons now, after disappearing almost entirely from many wardrobes as women not in the British royal family were freed from some of the more egregious dress code strictures of the past century."

She went on to offer an interesting history of pantyhose, concluding that Rihanna might pull off walking around sans slacks, but us normals could probably just expect to see hosiery trickle into our styling.

That's fine, too, but I've got to be honest. I think I've been waiting for this no-pants moment my whole life.

Picture it. Sicily. 1912. Wait, no, wrong scene. Picture it. Ohio. 1989. Possibly 1990? Those footless tights trimmed around the ankle in lace were massively cool, nay, RAD. Imagine an oversized, off-shoulder T-shirt tied at the side with a scrunchie. On the head, babysitter bangs. On the feet, a sweet pair of Sam and Libby bow ballet flats. On the legs, only the tights.

Oh, how I wanted to be this girl. I have a strong core memory of coming out of my room in what I assumed to be this exact hot fire fashion look. I was ready to go! To wherever we were going! In reality, I was simply wearing a shirt that barely covered the important bits with tights on the bottom. I was rocking no pants, that's all. My mom politely informed me I must go back to my room and put on pants. She wasn't wrong.

If I were charging myself $95 per hour in a beige room with an ocean sound machine, I'd say: My subconscious is attempting to liberate my inner child from metabolizing data points in an era of super-information, overstimulation and constant agitation. From despair.

Despair. It's a word on my mind because the writer George Saunders used it so deftly in his Office Hours newsletter recently. A passage he wrote moved me:

"Sometimes, I find myself feeling a need to protect my heart a little. I've read somewhere that the stomach was designed for certain simple foods and has never really caught up with, say, the Super Colossal Mac-and-Cheese Taco served on a Spicy Bed of Lard Cubes (TM).

"I wonder if, these days, the mind might find itself in a similar fix — designed to work in small, localized settings, with input from a couple of dozen people we know and care about. And then here comes the world, via media, and the poor nervous system starts responding sympathetically, wanting to help, to solve, to intervene, suffering at other people's hardships, as it should (as it is designed to do), feeling outraged... but because of the shift in scale, it's being asked to do more than it can realistically do, and the result is agitation and, sometimes (in my experience) despair."

He went on to describe how, for him, reading and writing are small positive acts, the tools that ready his heart for helping: "gentle actions, that create subtle tides of gentleness in an ungentle world."

Grasping at any available contentment is not the answer to the dozens of other treacherous issues that don't involve pantyhose. But maybe being more open to the idea of happiness serves a higher purpose; we should reach down deep for those raw moments embodied so flawlessly by would-be 8-year-old fashion icons, crawl into cozy pockets of joy where we can and shed our unhelpful, angsty sandbags. Pants optional.

Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on Twitter or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

Photo credit: semen zhuravlev at Unsplash