Costumes

"Why are you wearing that?"

I was wearing a renaissance outfit at the time, which I had pieced together slowly over a number of years as I travelled to faires. It was a bit of a money sink, but I made good use of that outfit, and it was something that brought me a lot of pride and joy. Granted, most people looked at it and assumed I was dressing as a pirate, but that was their fault for taking the media's influence as though it were fact. So the fact that someone was asking me why I were it wasn't necessarily unusual or unwarranted. 

"Because I feel like it."

"No you're not." The man's words were bizarre to me. He spat them at me immediately after I gave him my answer, as though he were prepared to shoot me down. I'm sure he could see the confusion in my eyes. What right did he have to tell me that he knew me better than I did? That he knew why I did things?

"You do it because you're not happy with yourself," he told me. "You want to be something that you're not, because you think that what you are isn't good enough. You try to hide behind a facade that enables you to feel stronger. But that's not strength. That's just you giving up on yourself. That's just you hiding."

Perhaps in another place or situation, his words may have had some credence to them. Maybe, from the way he delivered his statement, it was not the first time he had given such a speech, and with those before me, it had meant something to them. But with me...

"First of all," I retorted, "I'm not hiding behind this. If I was, this wouldn't be the first time in the three months you've known me that you've seen me like this. In fact, this is me literally wearing myself on my sleeves. I'm a medieval history major. I'm wearing this because it's part of who I am, and a part that I'm proud of. And not only this, but I have a half dozen of these kinds of outfits, all of which represent a different part of who I am, what I do, and what I like. So don't tell me that I'm hiding behind something I'm not when I have literally never before been more who I am."

The man's face was stunned. I don't think he'd ever gotten a response like that before. Never seen someone fight back against him in such a way. But the way he had talked down on me had irritated me, and I wasn't ready to let him get away with it.

"And secondly, the reason I felt like wearing it today in particular is because I have a final in my Medieval History class today, and I found it appropriate to wear."

He mumbled something about what he had said becore, weakly trying to insist on it, but I checked out when I realized he wasn't going to budge on that. It wasn't worth arguing. I'd be who I was, and he'd be him, and life would go on.