Do you want me to wear a dress or romper today? Do you prefer gold or nude eyeshadow? Do you want my hair curled or straight? Should I paint my nails or just leave them blank? Should I wear a tie? Are my dress shoes formal enough? Why don’t you show me what you want me to look like today? Who should I be today?
Do you ever find yourself asking people these questions? Most of the people reading this probably said no; of course not. You're kidding and you're right - you don’t. But do you ever find yourself looking in the mirror at an outfit you threw together and have changed the top three or four times? Now ask yourself why did you do that. Your answer probably was because you just didn’t think it looked very good. Now answer me: why is that? Who dictated that the original outfit wasn’t good enough to be seen in? Are you sure it was just you?
When you were a little girl or boy, did you look in the mirror and spend an hour picking out the perfect outfit for the day? No, you went outside and played with your friends in the park, shooting some hoops or baking delicious mud pies. You didn’t care about what you looked like. That is, until the first time someone looked at you and said you didn’t look good enough. That situation (or ones like that) probably happened a couple more times. Then over time you started dressing and presenting yourself to please the people that may have think you looked too different or too unique. You asked them: how can I help you in your mind? And then responded by altering yourself to their will and who they wanted you to be.
You might not realize it but most of us are probably dressing to impress, not ourselves, but the people behind the mirror screaming that we are not good enough. For those of you reading this that do dress and put on makeup as a show of who you are, that is amazing and something to be extremely proud of. You figured out who you were behind the mask society decided fit you best. But for those of us still putting on that mask that is ill fitting and torturous, maybe we should take off that mask for a while and see how much happier it makes us. Take time to find the face that was hiding under the mask, the face the world hid from you, and the face that was made for you and only you.
The world has been taking us from birth and telling us that we aren’t good enough as we are. We start buying into that opinion and begin fashioning ourselves to their judgments and make ourselves just another oily cog in the machine of fake harmony and happiness. That machine is slowly chipping apart the soul of our world and turning it into one large carbon copy of the utopian rule book. But maybe if we took a stand, and threw our masks amongst the gears, the machine would clog up. Then it would give us a chance to remake the world into, not a utopia, but a place where difference is important, uniqueness is venerated, and the faces we were born with are finally good enough.
So I challenge you to throw your mask to the wind and begin to make this hellish dystopia a world we can finally be proud of, and so you can make yourself the person you want to be - not who the mirror told you was acceptable.
