44.

Dress Up

A few years ago, I bought a pair of huge, round, orange-rimmed sunglasses—not because I thought that I could pull them off, but because I really like to the idea of that person, the version of myself who can jauntily throw on a pair of outrageous sunglasses and stroll out the door, carefree and fabulous. On the real life me, those sunglasses look ridiculous, but they are connected to this idea of myself that exists vividly just outside the realm of reality, one that I have held onto for years—desperately at times. As my mom and sister will remember, when the orange sunglasses went over the side of the paddleboat and into the lake, I did not hesitate to throw my body overboard. I dove down after them and opened my eyes under lake water until I saw them. The whole thing lasted a total of about four seconds and as I climbed back into the boat there was a moment, before the laughing, where my mom and sister just stared at me, frozen in a shared state of utter confusion.

There is this long-lived part of my personality that feels compelled to wear mildly strange and surprising things on my body. It’s not a constant compulsion, but it has surfaced consistently every few years. The first incident I can remember was in sixth grade when I insisted on wearing big plastic earrings shaped, in perfect detail, like pieces of popcorn. I loved them, but more than that I loved the idea of me in them. They were just weird enough, hinting at an inner weirdness that I imagined people would find irresistibly charming and unique.

When I was a kid I used to have a little trunk—and later a huge cardboard box—full of “dress up” clothes, grown up dresses and jackets and costume jewelry and hats. The thought of that dress up box still thrills me, butterflies in the stomach thrills me. It held the possibility for transformation. I would go upstairs, close the door, and try on grown up lives. Sometimes I would play with other people, but mostly I would slip into the clothes by myself, imaging, even acting out, the lives I was trying on. They weren’t often very glamorous lives, just different. They were always me somehow, but they were different versions of me.

I can see now that have spent a lot of time living between myself and imagined versions of myself. I think that such imagination is essential for growth and aspiration, but there has to be a balance, an appreciation of all that I am in this moment, along with hope and desire for new elements of my personality. I guess the big picture thing here is that I’m living the part of my life that I used to act out in the dress up clothes. I’ve reached a point where my imagined self and current self are coming face-to-face more dramatically than they have before, which means I have to be honest in new ways about who I am and what I want and why I want it. That doesn’t mean letting the orange sunglasses go overboard, but it does mean looking more carefully at the fears and desires that they represent.