“‘You’ is a very fluid concept right now.”

This week I went to the jewelry store with a purpose. I wanted to buy a pair of earrings. Big earrings. Dangly earrings. And I fully intended to wear them.

If you know me well at all, you know I am not a dangly-earrings type of person. I don’t like to stand out, and this self-consciousness creeps, sometimes subconsciously, into my fashion choices. When I wear makeup (and these days I actually do put on makeup every morning) I stay as subtle as possible. I can tell that I’m wearing makeup (because I know what I look like without it), but I don’t want other people to notice. No lipstick. No purple eye shadow. When I buy clothing, I will sometimes try on a funky shirt or two, but I will usually walk away with jeans, solid-color T’s, turtlenecks. And when and if I wear earrings, they are almost always small, silver hoops.

It’s not that I’m not concerned about how I look. In fact, I think it’s possible to be rather conservative and still look quite nice. I’m kind of picky about my solid-colored t-shirts, the cut of my jeans, the fit of my turtlenecks and zippered sweaters. I’m quite comfortable with my sense of fashion—it’s something I’ve struggled long and hard to acquire. (Just take a look at photographs of me from my high school days—or better yet, don’t and just trust me.) I know what’s me and what’s not, what I’ll feel comfortable wearing and what I won’t. In recent years I've even branced out into lower necklines, brighter colors, shoe coordination, the occasional dab of lip gloss. I’m happy where I am.

Mostly.

As happy as I am with who I am, there’s this little rebellious part of me that occasionally wants to break out. As comfortable as they are, comfort zones get boring after a time. in the bigger scheme of things, this is why I sometimes entertain the idea of not just embarking on a new path within the confines of my course of study, but going back and getting a completely new degree, or why I occasionally contemplate not just moving to another apartment, or even another city, but to the other side of the world. I think about chopping my hair really, really short, or spending a year without a car, or turning vegetarian for a month just to see if I can, or hiking the Appalachian trail. I don’t actually do these things (deep down I don't really want to anyway), but I dream about it, and then every once in awhile I’ll do something comfortably crazy, like move to Washington, D.C., or apply to graduate school on a snow-day-inspired whim. Or buy a pair of dangly earrings.

Okay, buying a pair of earrings is not nearly on par with picking up and moving across the country, much less with, oh I don’t know, teaching English in Russia. And as far as 3-inch long dangly earrings go, these ones are reasonably tame. But a year ago I don’t think I would be caught dead wearing jewelry so…noticeable. Or if I did put the earrings on in the morning, I would have self-consciously pulled them off after looking at myself in the mirror twenty times, before even walking out the door.

It’s funny how we sometimes define ourselves by what we wear, or maybe let what we wear come to define us. The very fact that I bravely attached the earrings to my earlobes (and yes, they felt awfully strange there) and then gave hardly another thought to their presence, must say something about me, though I’m not quite sure what. I am now a Person-Who-Wears-Dangly-Earrings. But not a Person-Who-Wears-Dangly-Earrings-All-the-Time, because that’s a completely different type of person (like my third grade teacher, who used to tell us she could feel her earrings shaking when she wanted us to quiet down). Nevertheless, I feel like the very fact that today I am a Person-Who-Wears-Dangly-Earrings when yesterday I was a Person-Who-Would-Never-Wear-Dangly-Earrings means something, no matter how small, has fundamentally changed about who I am. I like to think it is for the good.

And at the very least it got me some nice compliments today in church.