Playing Dress Up

When I was around 5 years old, and I had a few unsupervised moments, sometimes I would sneak into my parent’s bedroom and try on my mother’s clothes, shoes and make-up. It was thrilling to be able to fulfill my vast curiosity of womanly items without any supervision or rules. I could finally explore the things that I only knew about from the media and that I saw the adults in my life wear or use or do. For a fleeting moment I could pretend I was something unimaginable, a princess or a movie star or just a beautiful grown-up woman.

Eventually, like all good things, this brief thrill would always come to an end when whoever was supposed to be watching me finally realized I was gone. Someone would walk into the room, searching for me and break the spell.

What they found when they walked in was a little girl frozen in front of a full length mirror. Lipstick smudges across my face, teetering back and forth in high heels that could easily fit two of her little feet into one of them, wearing a dress that billowed out around her into a pile on the floor and fell way below the appropriate area on her chest, which she thought could be solved by pushing her arms together tightly in front of her to make the allusion of cleavage.(Whenever my father saw me doing this he would always chuckle and say, “don’t grow up too fast there missy.”)

Eventually like most children, I outgrew this phase, but the reason my five year old self did this, the desire behind it, I haven’t really grown out of. I don’t know if anyone ever does. I think as humans we all have that same curiosity of the unknown and the same yearning to be something that we aren’t. When you are a child you desperately want to be a cool teenager. When you have straight hair, you want to have curly hair. When you are underage you dream about the day you can drink freely and openly as a 21+ year old. When you are home you want to be away and when you are away you want to be home. When you are old you want to be young again, snd so on, and so on and so on. I think that as you go through life you may out grow a certain desire, or a want to be a certain way, but every time you out grow one of these things, it isn’t long before you establish a new one. You never grow out the idea of wanting to be something that you aren’t or striving to be something that you aren’t because if you did, then there wouldn’t be anything to aim for in life.

This isn’t to say that I condone the idea that you should always be self-conscious and not accept who you are, and to cope you always try to be something that you aren’t. No. This is me saying that, maybe it isn’t a bad thing to try to be something that you aren’t. The desire to be something that you aren’t doesn’t have to have negative connotations; it can actually be a great way to expand yourself to be better person and to strive to do things you never thought you were capable of doing (and best of all to have fun doing it.) Life isn’t necessarily about where you end up, but it’s about how you get there.

My 5 year old self wanted to be something that she wasn’t, but she had fun trying to reach that goal. She fulfilled her curiosity, and had practice for what was to come years later. In the end this desire helped me to continue to grow, try new things, and expand myself as a whole. Today I want to be a magazine editor or a big time magazine writer in New York City. Who knows if that will actually happen, but I am sure as hell going to strive to get there and have a lot of fun along the way.