What My Wardrobe Carried Until I Could

I never wanted to dress like the other girls.

It wasn’t rebellion.

It wasn’t even discomfort.

It was something quieter — a kind of resistance I didn’t yet have words for.

I just knew I didn’t belong in pink dresses and glittery shoes lined up like stage props.

They looked like invitations to a performance I had no interest in auditioning for.

I wasn’t against femininity.

I just didn’t like the version they were selling — pastel, performative, brittle.

I didn’t know yet what I wanted instead.

But I knew it had to be real.

So I asked my grandmother — a seamstress — to make me a coat.

It took her some time to work out what I was really asking for.

I didn’t know the proper name.

A trench coat.

Not a child’s coat.

A proper one.

The kind I’d seen in old films — worn by women who moved like they meant it, their heels echoing off polished streets.

I was too young for heels.

But a trench coat?

That I could wear.

The heels would come later.

My mum still tells the story.

How I stood there, small but certain,

asking for something sharp, structured, and not remotely appropriate for my age.

Even then, I knew:

if I was going to wear something,

it had to mean something.

But there was a stretch of time where I stopped dressing for myself altogether.

Not to blend in.

But to refuse expectation.

Baggy jeans. Hoodies. Trainers that said nothing.

I wasn’t dressing like a boy.

I was dressing in refusal.

It worked.

Mostly.

But it also meant disappearing differently.

It took years to feel comfortable in my body.

Longer still to feel safe enough to re-enter the world of colour, of shape, of silhouette.

But when I did, I didn’t return to femininity.

I rebuilt it.

Structured dresses.

Statement heels.

Saturated colour.

Not to be looked at — but to anchor myself.

Not decoration — but architecture.

Clothes don’t just mark time for me.

They hold it.

They map it.

And colour —

colour is the signal I didn’t realise I was sending all along.

When I’m happy, I see it more vividly.

I wear it more easily.

When colour starts fading from my wardrobe,

it’s already fading from me.

There was a time I couldn’t wear pink.

Not because I hated it.

Because it felt like a costume for someone I didn’t recognise.

Too soft.

Too compliant.

Too expected.

Now?

It’s everywhere.

In my home.

On my heels.

In the details I used to flatten out.

I don’t wear it to feel like a girl.

I wear it because it no longer threatens who I’ve become.

No Fit Found.

But it came in pink.

Image by Craig Adderley, via Pexels