Well Dressed

As can be the case with arriving at Queer at a later stage of life, I can look back and see little things - small acts, thoughts, behaviors - that in the moment seem like not so big a deal but when added together through memory and time lead to a conclusion of "oh yeah this was coming." I remember trying on my mothers heels as a child. I remember looking over her vanity and scrutinizing everything that was there in wonder. I can still picture that vanity, which was really just a clothes dresser with a big mirror on top of it and everything scattered about in the way a woman who worked for a living with three (and then four) kids kept their space. God, she worked so hard. That sentence makes it sound like she's dead she is absolutely not dead she is alive and living in Philadelphia. Thankfully not working nearly as hard as she used.

Mom had these patterns laying about all the time. She was pretty good with a sewing machine. She made me both a Real Ghostbuster Egon Spangler jumpsuit - yeah the blue one - and a Star Trek: The Next Generation William Riker red jumpsuit. I wore them until they no longer fit my proportions. Just a little twink idiot running around Depew on an away mission. I have ALWAYS loved dressing up. Then you get old enough in the mid 90s where people tell you that you should stop dressing in odd ways in the ways that red suburban kids tell each other they shouldn't. In an act of self preservation I buried those instincts, which were just, you know, ME, deep. Placed upon a mine cart all the way down until they arrived at the "until divorced" level of the cavern. Why did I have anxiety problems all of my life? The world wonders.

The thing about becoming older as a millennial - someone who lived through the Great Recession and the Obama Years and all of that specifically - is that you are used to having your hopes rag dolled on live television. Maybe you thought you would have a career, or a home. Our generation was where the American dream abruptly arrested itself. You can react to this in any sort of ways I guess. My politics were radicalized most certainly. I also stopped caring. Not about others. I stopped caring about, I don't know, how I was supposed to be. It hadn't produced results, after all. I assumed there was an implicit promise that if I followed the rules of How I Was Supposed To Be that I would be rewarded with a place or station or something that was at least stable. That never really arrived. I guess I was conforming for the benefit of others rather than myself. Maybe that's what mid-life crisis are about? This doesn't feel like a crisis though. It can't be a crisis if the panic stops.

I went out with my kids yesterday dressed cute. Red heels, grey leggings, knee length skirt, my Lefturn The Pit shirt, and red raincoat I swapped from a thrift store. I had bought a black purse - my first real honest to god purse - the day before. I was wearing liner, and shadow, and lipstick and I felt fucking cute let me tell you. I didn't take a picture of myself even though I thought about it. I don't know I was busy. You can't take a picture of a feeling.

If I had done anything like this as a kid in the 90s, I would've been assaulted. Now my coworkers, my friends and my partners tell me I look good or that I'm beautiful. I am working on processing that change, but it is nice.