Years ago, I read about the sapeurs of Congo, men living with limited means who spent extraordinary care, money, and intention on clothing, color, elegance, and style. At first glance, it can seem irrational. It is not.

Dress, for them, is not vanity. It is dignity. It is self-definition. It is a refusal to let circumstance have the final word on identity. I have been thinking about that today.

Today is Juneteenth.

Today, I am picking up a purple suit from the same place where, after a fall and head injury, I was restrained, masked, and moved through a system that saw my dysregulation before it saw my humanity. That detail matters. I was not suicidal. I was injured, frightened, sleep-deprived, and unheard. That experience is now published.

Today, I am thinking about clothing. About color. About dignity. About what it means to return to a place where your body was controlled and choose, deliberately, how you will be seen.

There are moments when the body remembers a room before the mind is ready to re-enter it. The hallway, the floor, the staff, the door, the air, all of it can become charged. A place is never just a place after something happens there. It becomes part of the body’s archive.

So returning matters. Not because the place deserves ceremony.

Because I do.

A suit does not erase what happened. It does not undo restraint. It does not heal post-intensive care syndrome, grief, or the old wounds the body still carries. Healing is not always the same as erasure.

Sometimes healing is returning with authorship. Sometimes beauty is a form of resistance. Sometimes elegance is not escape. It is reclamation. Sometimes color is not decoration. It is declaration. Sometimes you return to the place where you were reduced, not to relive the humiliation, but to reclaim authorship.

Purple, in this case, is not subtle. Good.

Purple carries meanings that resist simplification: royal, spiritual, defiant, tender. It refuses to fit neatly into a box. That feels right today.

I have spent much of my life helping people breathe, sleep, survive, and recover. I know that restoration is not only clinical. It is also symbolic, relational, and deeply embodied.

Medicine often teaches us to explain wounds, categorize them, measure them, code them, and treat them. All of that matters. Not all repair happens in the language of diagnosis. Sometimes medicine cures disease without restoring strength. Sometimes it treats the injury without restoring agency. Sometimes it resolves the crisis without returning joy.

That is why symbols matter. Some repair happens through ritual. Some through witness. Some through breath. Some through color.

These days, we spend a great deal of time talking about how we identify ourselves. We speak of identity as declaration, as language, as inner truth brought outward. That matters. Yet how we are identified by others often determines what happens next. Seen as a physician, you may be consulted. Seen as a patient, you may be treated. Seen as distressed, you may be helped. Seen as dangerous, you may be controlled.

In that same place, at the same time, profound distortions of identity occurred. Returning does not erase that. It does allow me to choose, again, how I will be seen. We do not heal only by explaining what happened.

Sometimes we heal by choosing what we wear back into the room.

Ravi S. Aysola is a pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine physician, scientist, inventor, and founder. He is the founder and CEO of The Aysola Center for Respiratory, Sleep, and Restorative Medicine, a concierge medical practice focused on complex sleep, breathing, fatigue, autonomic arousal, and restorative health.

Dr. Aysola previously served in senior academic leadership roles in sleep medicine, including as clinical professor of medicine and chief of the sleep medicine section at UCLA, where he was also the former director of the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center. He helped build multidisciplinary programs integrating pulmonary medicine, critical care, sleep medicine, neuromuscular care, dental sleep medicine, ENT, behavioral sleep care, and post-ICU recovery. His work is shaped by both clinical expertise and lived experience as a former ICU survivor, giving him a rare perspective on how medicine can better address recovery, resilience, and human physiology.

He is also the founder and CEO of TOORYA, a health technology company developing tools to measure and improve sleep, vigilance, and physiologic readiness. His research spans pulmonary imaging, obstructive sleep apnea physiology, cardiopulmonary sleep medicine, patient-centered sleep apnea care, and physiologic signal analysis, with additional work available on PubMed. His current focus bridges clinical medicine, technology, restorative sleep therapy, and human performance, helping patients and organizations move beyond fragmented care toward deeper recovery and sustained function. He shares updates on LinkedIn.