The Dress I Never Wore

When I was fourteen, I bought a dress at The Gap that I never wore.

It was the mid-nineties. A peach polo mini-dress, fitted, with a sharp Oxford-style collar. This was the kind of dress that walked into a room before you did, and I knew that because all the popular older girls in my high school had one. I had saved up for it with my own money and carried it home in The Gap bag like I'd pulled off a heist.

It was one size too small.

I knew it the moment I tried it on in the store. I bought it anyway, because the plan was that I'd earn it. I would do the work all summer, and by August I would put on that peach dress and walk out of my room as the version of myself it deserved.

That isn't what happened.

Before summer even started, I took the dress to my older sister Jen's room and asked her to try it on for me. The truth was that I couldn't stand to look at myself in it. I wanted to see what she looked like wearing what I had bought, so I could borrow the picture from her.

She put it on. She looked beautiful. I stood there looking at the dress I had paid for on the body I had decided deserved it.

I did the work. I worked all the way through the summer. By August, the dress still hung in the closet. By September, it was at the back of it.

I never wore it.

Most women have a version of this dress somewhere. A piece bought for a body you were going to earn, or a life you were going to grow into. The piece was never the test. Your body was never the problem. The test was a trick your younger self learned somewhere, and it was never yours to pass.

PUT ON the piece you've been treating like a test, as yourself, today. Or let it go with gratitude for what it taught you. Either one is freedom

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