TW: sexual harassment 

You know you’ve made a significant change in your appearance when you have to set a new Face ID for your iPhone. Or when a friend says that they don’t recognize you today because you’re not wearing the color black. Or when you run into your former TA and the first thing they say to you is, “No eyeliner today?”

And you know you’re committed to a look when you go through an eyeliner stick every one-and-a-half weeks, and two-thirds of your closet is the same color, and your nose feels naked without your septum. It’s even changed your body language: You don’t wipe your eyes when they itch anymore because it would smudge your makeup. 

You also know you have a fairly distinct look when you wonder, at least once a day, “Is there something on my face?” Because some people do a quiet double take when they glimpse you in passing. And then you remember, “Oh right, I’ve basically painted my eye bags black. A lot of people don’t do that.” 

As a child, I went to an all-girls K-8 school that required a uniform. From kindergarten to fourth grade, I wore a plaid button-up dress and white sneakers, per the dress code. Then, for the remaining years, I wore a knee-length navy blue skirt and white button-up midi that constricted my chest so much that I was often in pain. “They’re like straitjackets if you have boobs,” said my eighth-grade Spanish teacher, who had also gone to the school. 

You may be thinking, “It’s just a uniform; it’s not that deep,” but when you’re a bullied preteen who dreads walking up your school’s steps more than death itself, a boob-maiming uniform that makes you look like a sailor is the last thing you need. 

In high school, I was suddenly overwhelmed by choice. I could wear whatever I wanted. Every. Single. Day. My freshman and sophomore years saw a lot of jeans and striped crop tops—almost like a new, self-imposed uniform, just slightly more Brandy Melville-influenced. After the COVID shutdown ended, I came back to my high school campus obsessed with cottagecore and dressed accordingly. Long, flowy sundresses and florals were a staple. Whenever I wore these outfits, I felt pretty but also somehow like a girl pretending to be a girl. It was like I had gone to Party City and picked out a “girl” costume, and out of the package had tumbled a near floor-length floral-patterned cotton dress. It wasn’t a bad feeling necessarily, and I was too busy applying to college to worry too much about my looks. 

But one afternoon, my friend P. came home from college. P. is one of the most aesthetically cohesive people I know. If you knew them, and I said “That shirt is soooooo P.,” you’d have an image in your head within seconds and know exactly what I’m talking about. To give you some visuals, think platforms, chains, dyed hair, the color black, and piercings—bright colors, too, but mostly as tasteful accents. On this particular afternoon, they said they wanted to do a photoshoot with me, and I happily obliged, knowing what a skilled photographer they are. They then proceeded to dress me in huge black boots, an oversized blazer, and a silver spiked collar, and took photos of me looking edgy and mysterious at various locations around San Francisco. 

That day, posing for my friend and their camera, I felt a feeling I had never known before; the clothing felt like an extension of my skin, of me. I didn’t feel like I was dressing up like Indigo—I was Indigo. It was that afternoon that my present-day aesthetic sensibilities were born, and today, even when I’m barely awake and already running late to my 10 a.m., I will put on some eyeliner, throw on a pair of statement earrings, and make sure there’s at least one black article of clothing in the mix. 

I could end my lifestyle piece here. Stories with neat resolutions sell well—look at any movie theater’s showings or the bestseller list. Narratives with confusing endings are usually given bad reviews on Letterboxd and Goodreads. (Perhaps this is a result of capitalism, but that isn’t the central focus of this piece.) So, while I could leave you with the image of me stomping around campus in all my dorky, colorless glory, that would be lying to you by omission. 

Because consider this: From a young age, men decided to start talking to me. These were men I didn’t know, who would come up to me in public, sometimes calling me beautiful, other times saying things too vulgar for me to repeat without my hands shaking. Men have done this to me in front of my parents. They have yelled at me out of car windows, refused to stop talking to me after I kindly told them to fuck off, followed me for blocks and blocks, etc. (How much pain and fear can one “etc.” hold?) In fact, just this weekend, I took a bad tumble on a run, and as my blood dripped onto the sidewalk, my skin stinging as the wind whistled against my leg, I got catcalled. Even with a bleeding leg, hunched over in pain, according to his logic I still deserved to be harassed. Before he saw a bleeding body, he saw a feminine one.

Therefore, it was not lost on me that when I started dressing like this—filling in my eye bags with eyeliner and wearing all black—I was catcalled, approached, and harassed far less. In fact, wherever I went, people started to give me a bigger personal space bubble than I’d ever had before. Now people look at me more, sure, but interact with me far less. So even if I don’t dress for the male gaze, I’m certainly listening to it. 

But bear with me, one last time, as I complicate things further. This Tuesday, two boys waited at the bottom of a staircase in my dormitory while I walked up it so that they could look up my skirt and made vulgar comments about what they saw to each other. (You don’t need to know their precise words to understand that they were monsters who made me feel small.) As I walked out of the stairwell, humiliated and nauseous, I could hear them running up the staircase mimicking the exact cadence of my Doc Martens hitting the floor and laughing. Somehow, in the span of a minute, I had been converted from an object of desire into one of ridicule. What perturbed me the most was the fact that they’d probably hang out normally after. My day had been derailed; meanwhile, to them I’d just be a funny encounter they’d eventually forget. 

All this happened while I was wearing one of my everyday getups, which typically repels random, public, male heterosexual desire (or at least the expression of it to my face). Afterward, I remembered I had plans to go on a run with a friend, and I wasn’t going to cancel them because of those two. So, I wiped off my eyeliner and changed into a pair of floral running shorts and a T-shirt. I told my friend what happened and it helped. 

The next day, I woke up. As always, I was late for my 10 a.m., but as always, I took a few minutes to fill in my eyebags, color them black—black like the void, black like dread, black like a scream into a pillow, but also black like the ocean at night, black like two crows spinning in aimless circles against a clear blue sky, black like the darkness of your eyelids as you drift off to sleep.