Would You Rather? by Katie Heaney

Author:Katie Heaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

10

WHAT NOT TO WEAR

Two hours after I came out to my mom over the phone, she called me back with a follow-up question: “Are you still going to wear dresses?”

I thought this was funny, and sweet. It was funny because it was so Mom, but even more so because I loved dresses. I laughed. “Yes!!” I assured her. Of course I would still wear them. I was exactly the same person as before. Right?

About a month later I flew back home to Minnesota for my ten-year high school reunion, and my mom and I went shopping. I bought a sundress that was emerald-green—my favorite color. It was a little too daytime-beachside-barbecue for my reunion, but I texted a picture of me wearing it to Lydia, and she texted back a series of heart-eyes emojis, so I decided to buy it anyway. I packed it into my suitcase, flew back to Brooklyn, and hung it up in my closet, where it remained, untouched, for more than a year.

I’ve worn a dress a few times since then—to a fund-raiser cocktail party in muggy early September, on some other ordinary day too hot to consider allowing fabric to touch my inner thighs—but somehow, at some point, without realizing that a shift was taking place until it was complete, something horrible happened: I proved my mother right. I stopped wanting to wear dresses. I was not exactly the same person as before.

I didn’t really notice anything was up until fall came, and suddenly one of my favorite easy workday looks—a sweater over a skirt with tights and boots—no longer appealed to me. Something just looked…off. All my skirts were too poufy, and the dresses hung lifelessly off my body. I looked too girly. As someone who, at least until then, liked to look somewhat girly, at least some of the time—someone who regularly browsed Anthropologie’s sale section, who’d pictured Kevin Costner’s wife’s giant, billowing wedding dress as the platonic ideal of wedding dresses since 2004—this was disorienting to me. I chalked it up to the normal ups and downs of dressing oneself, vowing to try the offending outfit again a few days later. But then that day would come, and it still didn’t look, or feel, right.

It was a strange feeling to miss my dresses as they hung, unharmed and available, in my closet. The only thing stopping me from wearing them was me. I wished I still wanted to wear them, but I didn’t. I didn’t want new ones for a long time, either, and because of that, an entire window of shopping possibility was closed on me.

It wasn’t just dresses and skirts, either; I lost entire stores. My Internet browser’s search bar still auto-filled the names of former favorites—Madewell, H&M, J.Crew, LOFT, all the places I’d almost always been able to find something I wanted. But after I stopped looking at their dresses, I noticed myself losing interest in their other clothes, too. Suddenly it all looked so…heterosexual.

Maybe it’s silly

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