The Other Dress

Before

Before

Izzy

These days, I live my life according to the motto ‘What if I didn’t…’

- What if I didn’t wear that beautiful dress?

- What if I didn’t go to that party?

- What if I didn’t study for that test?

Some of the answers are quite simple.

If I didn’t go to the party, I’d probably miss out on having a great time with my friends, but maybe whatever else I was doing would make up for it.

If I didn’t study for the test, I’d probably fail it. This can mean that I’ll have to retake it, or I’d have to make up for it with my other grades on that subject.

I tend to ask the ‘what if I didn’t…’ question a lot when it comes to the books I have to read for my literature class. I love books, but I never seem to be able to focus on what I need to read for class, I much prefer reading fanfic. So, I’d put off reading the book, or writing the essay, until it was far too late. Which is why even though everyone knows me as a bookworm, I only barely have a passing grade on the subject. Oops.

‘What if I didn’t…’ usually doesn’t have very fun answers, which means that I will be doing the thing, just because I want to.

But my life never used to be like that. I’d never ask myself “What if I didn’t…”

Instead, I worried about what other people would think of me if I did do things.

- What would they think of me if I did wear that beautiful dress?

- What would people think about me if I did go to that party?

- What would they think of me if I did study for that test?

The answers to these questions never really satisfied me, they scared me. They never made me feel good, they made me feel like I should just stay in line, not move too much and definitely not stand out from others.

The answers made me scared that people would think badly of me. That if I wore a beautiful dress, that people would think I was showing off or trying too hard to be girly. That if I showed up to a party, that people would think I was trying to get all the attention and that people wouldn’t even want me there. That if my grades were too high, that they’d think I was a study and only doing it to show off to the teachers.

So, I never wore the dresses, I didn’t go to the parties and I only had grades high enough to pass a class, never more than that. Staying as invisible as possible, because my life was complicated enough without being scrutinised by my classmates or other people.

My life existed in greys and muted colours. My grades never surpassed those of my most average classmates and I never ever stood out, it was what I thought was best for me.

I believed that I wasn’t someone who stood out. I believed that I was average, plain, boring. I tried to blend into the background, I tried for people not to notice me, because if they did, I’d have to face their judgement, their mocking. Because I shouldn’t be standing out, I was strange enough without bringing attention to myself in other ways.

And if it wasn’t for one person, one person I didn’t even know, one person who had no idea how much she would influence me. If it wasn’t for her, I would have never been here now. I would never have stood here, I would have never stepped forward and I would never have demanded my place in the spotlights. I would have never demanded to be accepted for myself.

It’s sad that she’ll never know. Because she’s no longer here. She’ll never know how her final words have inspired me to not let anyone take my light away from me.

Her final words, because her tragic death is the only reason why I know about her.

The beautiful girl, she was my age, still in secondary school, and she killed herself. I don’t know what her motto, or her question in life was, but her life ended with the words ‘I can no longer do this’.

That’s what her final letter said, ‘I can no longer do this, I can’t keep hiding myself from the world just because they won’t accept me.’

I learned about her when my own life had lost all of its colour, I learned about her when my life was a dark charcoal colour with a few spots of black. I had little to lose at that point and couldn’t see anything that would keep me going anymore.

I remember it so clearly, that final moment of the old me. That final moment of the old and innocent me. When my mum looked at me, sitting next to my dad, holding hands, holding each other so tightly that their knuckles were white, that I could see the white outline of their tendons against the red on the sides.

I don’t know why I remember it so well, maybe because this was the first time that they told me that I had to do something. The first time that, instead of letting me take the lead, they sat down and told me that I needed help, that I needed to live my life being me, not hiding in the shadows.

Or maybe it was because I was immediately aware that this was the final moment of what my life used to be like, that everything would be different from there on out.

I didn’t know who she was before that fateful day, but I know her name now, Vicky. I know that she was in many ways like me, and that what happened to her, what she ended up doing, could have happened to me too. Though, I think my parents understood that better than I did at the time.

That day, as I came home from school, my parents were both already at home, waiting for me. Which was odd because normally I’d be alone for a couple of hours before either of them even came home. I immediately knew something was wrong.

One moment, I knew nothing, I was still unaware. I walked through the door, unsuspecting of anything ever changing, having in a way accepted the fate of never-ending grey days.

But in only a couple of minutes time, I knew about Vicky, I knew that she was also living in this dark place in her mind, and I knew that she’d killed herself.

Vicky, like me, had been born a boy, and in many ways we grew up the same way. But she had resigned herself to the shadows, only living half a life, struggling to keep her head above the water. She could no longer live hiding her true self, hiding who she really was inside, and even after she started living her life as a girl, she couldn’t get out of that depression. It had gotten too deep, and wouldn’t let her go. Depression took her because people didn’t realise that that darkness in her head didn’t have anything to do with her being trans, but everything to do with bad brain chemistry. They were so focused on treating her gender, that they never thought to look elsewhere for her darkness.

My parents didn’t ask me if I wanted to talk to them, they didn’t ask me anything that day. They told me that they didn’t want the same thing to happen to me, they didn’t want to lose me to depression too, and that they’d made an appointment with a psychologist for me.

They didn’t want to lose their daughter, they understood that this constant grey I was living in had a name, depression, and that unless I got help, I’d never get out.

That day I realised three things:

1. I didn’t want to die.

2. What is the whole purpose of life, if I didn’t live it to the fullest?

And I no longer cared about other people’s responses to the most important question of all:

3. What if I did wear that beautiful dress?

What could go wrong?