For six years of secondary school, I woke up every chilly, Bay Area morning and donned the same uniform before scarfing down some bread and milk and rushing off to school. My younger self could easily have been an anime character, since I wore the same shabby thing every single day: a school sweatshirt (rotated between a few select ones) over a pair of cheap dark skinny jeans. I didn’t have the shame to wear pajamas to school, neither the guts to change my appearance otherwise. I merely appeared on campus each day, hunched over and retreating into the cloaked comfort of my gray or blue hooded sweatshirt, silently melting into the background of the chaos that is public education during the age of puberty.
The first time I willingly wore a skirt to school was the end of senior year. College applications were in, GPA almost set in stone, and in a few months I might never see these people around me again, so a timid version of the second semester senior’s YOLO mentality began to fester in my mind. But I didn’t initiate the change in myself. One day, a close friend of mine, a freshman still navigating the weird hormonal waters of high school, sent an SOS to our group chat. She hated anything fancy and girly, but had to dress up for a performance in her third period Drama 1 class. In her desperate Facebook message, she asked the nine of us to dress up with her.
That one message was the potent catalyst of something great and big that had been hidden all along. All nine of us hopped on board immediately, discussing outfits and makeup options with a passion I never realized was there. “Lipstick” and “mascara” were rarely on our faces or even in our vocabularies, but some latent femininity in all of us had finally found a sunny spot in which to bloom. The next day was the best day ever. We were all main characters of a dreamy shoujo anime. As each of us entered the hallway where we congregated every morning, I’m quite sure the world slow-motioned itself around us as our classmates turned and stared in admiration at our brilliant transformations.
What had stunted us before was a fear of looking silly and being laughed at. Now the compliments flowed gratuitously, and we happily found the reality very different from our timid imaginations.
When I moved into my dorm this past summer, one of the things I brought with me along with my school supplies and wardrobe was this newfound sense of freedom and self-esteem. Of course, sweatshirt-and-jeans day still happen, especially on sleep-deprived midterm days when “getting up and getting ready for school” means “looking at the time, panicking, and sprinting out the door.” But on other days, I play dress up, like I did a decade ago with paper dolls. It makes me happy; there is no logical explanation for it. I do not dress to impress my friends or classmates. Or, that is only part of it. I dress to impress myself. Looking in the mirror to see a happy girl with nicely arched eyebrows and a cute outfit is so much more encouraging than seeing a frazzled, diffident face with puffy eyes and an intractable cowlick. I smile at the girl in the dorm mirror who shares my name and face before rushing out the door.
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