Disguises

Clothes

Basically clothes help to disguise or highlight aspects of your personality. I felt my style changing in my latter teenage years. I knew I was different. I didn’t like the way the others behaved. I didn’t like their fundamental lack of grit. They seemed like marshmellow puffs. I was different. I didn’t fit in with them and I wanted to mark my difference. I didn’t like their soft hair, I didn’t like their neat clothes and I didn’t like their preordained existence.

Though nobody would hear me shouting about it. I didn’t discuss my thoughts with any of them. So I put on a pair of red sneakers, I changed one shoe lace to green, I didn’t pair my socks, I wore baggy coloured pants, loose ripped or stained tops. I coloured my hair and eventually put super glue in it to hold it off my face.

People at school still treated me the same. I was just a bit wacky. But sometimes cars slowed down and boys yelled obscene things to me, or grannies would hold their purses tighter as I walked passed or children would ask their mothers what had that boy done to his hair?

It was all the same to me. I was me. I could feel comfortable without thinking about what the rest of the teenage world expected of me. I had stated with my abdication that I wasn’t in the running for Miss Teen America.

Those clothes and my hair gave me a shield. I was an unknown entity. I was capable of anything, I was an individual who said fuck you to all the crap about looking good for boys, about walking on the trodden paths, about agreeing to the society I was living it. Because I didn’t like what I saw. Abuse, lies, dishonesty, murder, transgressions, violence, drugs, evil, evil, evil. And I wasn’t going to take it. I was not going to sit here and drink wine to this world and eat bread to our future or past. I felt that new changes needed to be implemented before I ever wanted to associate myself with the rest of humanity.