Sparkly Blue Dress

(Editor's note: I have a habit of writing pieces about objects that aren't really about the objects. One time, I wrote about black dresses. This post, though, is mostly actually about the blue dress.) 

So on Friday, I tried on my high school prom dress which I also wore for a formal in college. 

This beauty right here.

Now, for the uninitiated, trying on old clothes is the most direct measure of how far you’ve progressed as a female. Can’t fit into your high school stuff? Don’t worry, happens to the best of us. Can’t fit into your college stuff? Man, who can, am I right? None of us are the sizes we were. 

Did you catch the implications in those responses?  

There's an internal and external judgement, an idea that we were better when we could fit into these smaller clothes. "Don't worry" assumes that you should have been worrying. "None of us" is comfort by association, thinking that one needs to be comforted. Those sentences are the lines of middle-aged mothers admiring their daughters’ appearance, remembering with bitter nostalgia the days when they looked like that. It’s the toothy smile of trophy wives who believe that each pound is another step towards divorce. It’s the byline of the overarching society that puts the teenage female body on a pedestal while mocking the teenage girl mind and spirit.

High School Prom- the last time I had my nails done at a salon.

Now, I never much bought into physical appearance, especially in high school. The female heroes in my books were only told they were beautiful by the men who loved them and that was the only affirmation that mattered to them. Loving someone’s appearance to me was a part of the whole true love package- loving someone’s appearance without loving their personality, their mind, their abilities, was to love incompletely. Y’all, that’s the guiding principle Teenage Me went by. She also thought that love stories dropped fully formed from the heavens and into our lives and that’s why she was perpetually single. Well, that and the fact that she turned down two boys over the phone in half an hour one Christmas break, thereby offending the universe and confirming her spinsterdom. Thanks, Teenage Me. 

But I also didn’t have anything to complain about in high school. I probably have one of the lowest pimple counts of any teenager to exist, especially one who didn’t actually care for her skin in any way. I never had braces. I have nice hair. I was busy enough with enough physical activities that, while never skinny, I was never chubby. And I couldn’t have cared less about any of this. Nobody ever told me that I was pretty and nobody ever told me that I was ugly. Other than myself. I just assumed that I was a little bit ugly, like the rest of humanity. So my appearance moved to a tertiary concern at best.

College- when untagging pictures is a Sisyphean task

I don’t really have anything to complain about now. Sure, I spend more time on the couch than I used to and my muscles and joints are slowly betraying me and my diet is, just, extraordinarily questionable, but I’m not disgustingly displeased with the way I look. I like my style. I still like my hair. I don’t have an occasion to wear anything more strenuous than sweatpants most of the time, so the topic doesn’t really come up too frequently. 

The occasion does come around, though, and Friday’s occasion was pre-West Coast Adventure planning. There’s a VidCon prom and I really wanted to wear my blue sparkly dress. It’s not… dignified, so I don’t think I’ll have much call to wear it again. But I love it. I love being in it. It’s strapless and floor-length and it’s got that stiff mesh stuff that makes dress poof out in the skirt so you rustle everywhere you go. Petticoat? I don’t think it’s a petticoat. Whatever. And the dress leaves a trail of blue sparkles wherever it goes and if that’s not a life goal, I don’t know what is. I have it in my mind that I want to leave a trail of sparkles wherever I go, including the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam, and ending at VidCon Prom. The last flight of the blue dress. 

Well, with such expectations, you can understand how disappointed I was when I couldn’t get the dress to zip up yesterday afternoon. Now, it was warm and the end of the day and I had substantial Chinese food and beer digesting in my stomach, so I was still left with hope despite the failure of my usual trick of zipping up the dress backwards and then twisting it around and pulling it up over any problematically large areas. It was just sweat and water weight. Only things between me and my dreams.

So this late-afternoon setback wasn’t all that bad and I definitely got over it- I went to the NC Blackberry Festival Friday Night beer garden with Joy and then we got pizza and went to a bar and it was, all in all, a good night. But I didn’t go back to the tank top and skirt I had been wearing that day. I settled for my comfy jeans and my green shirt, which I know I look stunning in without trying. I knew that I wasn’t excited to try to fit into anything else. 

Because for those ten seconds when I had to admit failure against the dress, all the ways I had learned to hate my body since high school came crashing down on me. Maybe it’s the backfat that I never had back when I was active and healthy. Maybe it's the surprise inches that have popped up across my measurements that came around for the same reason. All this is happening because you’re useless, you know, my spirit said. If you’d just exercised more or got your calories in some form other than liquid, you’d look much better. Look at you now. Your stomach is stretching your skin and your arms are chubby and have you looked at your cheeks recently? They’re like chipmunk cheeks, they’re so large. There’s no way your hair can make up for that, or for your double-chin. And let’s be honest, you don’t even know how to apply makeup to distract from what’s going on with the rest of the blob that is your body. And this damn dress still. won’t. zip. 

The lowest point, though, was when I thought about the girl that I had inherited the dress from. She went to my church and was graduating and was getting rid of old prom dresses and even though I was a couple years younger, we were about the same size. The blue dress had been a little loose in high school, but it was so pretty, I didn’t care. Of course, I wouldn’t let anyone take it in. But now, years in the future, as I struggled back out of the dress, I actually thought, “Well, now you’re fat like her.” 

Maybe I learned to judge bodies earlier than I thought. Other’s bodies. Not my own. 

I’m wearing the dress right now as I type this because I was just so damn proud of getting it on this morning. The trick worked and though the dress is snug, the zipper isn’t particularly strained. That little dumb hook thing at the top is never getting done, though. That’s silly. But I can’t shake the feeling that I feel better because now I feel prettier and more successful. I could get this dress back on. My prom dress from my junior year of high school. My formal dress from sophomore year of college. Yeah, I can still fit in it. Comfortably, ladies. Comfortably. 

And I know that’s wrong. I want to be excited because I get to wear my blue dress in all the places I wanted to wear it. It’s a plan fulfilled. But I can’t help feeling that the plan is dirty now because it’s tied into this body competition. Do I look as good in this dress as I did in high school? In college? As another girl would in this dress? 

Answer: hell yeah. 

You know what? Screw it. I’m going to choose to not participate in that. I’m a little exhausted by the fact that I’m going to have to choose to not participate in a daily mental body competition for the rest of my life, but hey, if it’s what it takes to be a good adult in this world, then that’s what I’ll do. And to the girl I got the dress from, I’m so sorry I even remotely thought disparagingly of your body. You have beautiful taste in clothes and are perfect the way you are. Thanks for making this moment possible. 

So yeah. 

Grand Canyon, here we come.

(Wanna know how this story ends? Find a "Best of the Blue Dress" post here.)