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It's Complicated

It's Complicated

Written by Katrina Garofalo

It seems as though as girls, when we were growing up, we fit into one of two categories: girly girl or tomboy. You liked dresses or you liked jeans. You liked playing house or you liked playing sports. You liked to be clean or you liked to play in dirt.

Obviously, reality wasn’t so for our young minds. We saw no problem in wearing a dress to play in the mud, because that is simply what we wore and that is simply what we wanted to do. No grand scheme or meaning was behind it – we liked what we liked.

Family, teachers, and sometimes peers, enforced those standards on us as we grew. We were expected to like only “girl” things or only “boy” things. As with many other aspects of our lives and identities, this persuasion filtered down to become most noticeable in the clothes we wore. Somewhere along the way to adulthood, we stuck with the idea that we were one or the other. The fear of not seemingly ladylike enough in pants was enough to keep some of us in skirts. For the rest of us, being taken seriously and wearing a dress never seemed to go hand in hand.

Reading it – writing it, even – makes the whole matter seem so trivial and silly and like it’s not real. But when it comes down to it, those thoughts are there. However different they sound in your head, however small and quiet they are, the notion that we have to be one or the other still crops up to nag at our insecurities and keep us in our little boxes.

That’s not to say there is something wrong with feeling your best as a girly girl or a tomboy. Being able to remove that fear that you are somehow doing something wrong, or not being true to yourself, or won’t be taken seriously is something that we forget to allow ourselves. Clothing is meant to reflect who we are. It’s meant to be fun and adventurous and whatever you want it to be.

There are no real rules or do’s and don’ts about what is feminine. There are no real boxes to check off for the rest of your life dictating how you express yourself and if it is right or wrong. As women we are squished into these tiny spaces, and are constantly made to take up increasingly smaller ones still. There are still barriers that we are all too familiar with that need breaking, crashing, and smashing. And those goals will take time.

In the mean time, a place where freedom can be found immediately is in our style. No matter how it may change on a day-to-day basis. Being true to yourself, whether in a dress or pants or both or none, is far more gratifying than fitting into any one box.

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