She Was Here

Playing dress up was my most favorite activity as a child. Rummaging through boxes of old photos I can find photographic record of myself as an infant: jet black curls wildly escaping a futile bun, one small brown and squishy hand clutches the white door frame for balance and the other pins a sippy cup to my purple onesie clad torso. All the while my tiny legs give it their all to imitate the way Mommy so fluidly walks in those black patent leather pumps. She chuckles at me as the flash immortalizes my very focused expression. Perhaps she laughs a bit harder upon realizing I somehow managed to get from the back of the closet to freedom. Her little baby just could not wait to grow up and be like her. Fast forward twenty-three years and the baby is still trying to make sense of the big girl clothes she can now fit.

Leave it to me to have an introspective breakthrough in an H&M dressing room, trying on clothes I have no business buying. None of the sensible “grown up” clothes fit me. No matter if I sized up or down. I looked funny. Correction, I looked forced in the items that went along with the aesthetic meant to tell fool the world into believing that I had my shit together. Even by my widened uncomfortable stance you could tell the reality was quite the opposite. But it was that nubuck fringe jacket I saw in a dream that fit like a glove. The jacket that made no sense from a practical point of view and didn’t match my ideal “big girl” aesthetic but it brought instant joy. Like I said before, I saw it in a dream. Just simply me wearing it but I remember feeling so right. That feeling when the outfit you imagined becomes a reality and it comes out right. Perhaps a better replacement for “right” is “me”; I felt genuinely, authentically and undoubtably like me. And that is when the realization hit me: much of the quarter life crisis fledgling adults go through mostly boils down to having an identity crisis as we become painfully aware that we are only cosplaying adults.

The quarter life crisis forces us to question whether or not the path we have followed is leading us to true fulfillment or are we just imitating the grown ups before us. Are we carving out paths and building identities that truly fulfill us or are we forcing ourselves into the molds approved by the adults before us because it appears to have worked for them? This is not to say they were completely wrong and many of them did what they had to do because they did not have to luxury of doing what they wanted or they simply had no idea where to begin. So let us refrain from entirely placing the blame on the generations before us.

In the past I wrote about how the hardest part about adulting is realizing that you do not need to ask for permission or wait for validation in the same way you once did as a child. If you really think about it, so much of our identities were formed in association to other people and institutions within our little bubbles. When that bubble is burst wide open many of us feel exposed and so damn confused because our sense of self now fully depends on us. It is terrifying yet simultaneously beautiful because this perceived ground zero leaves so much room for creativity. We can choose to keep bits and pieces from past versions of self and continue to explore. The process of defining oneself is fluid and infinite if one so chooses to be.