The Pains of Being Sans-Tights: One girl's story of finding confidence in an intentional wardrobe malfunction
It started out as an unconsious decision. I had been living as an exchange student in the sunny, Spanish coastal town of Alicante for 5 months and it was the dead of winter. Or, should I say, it was considered the dead of winter for every one of it's 500,000 + inhabitants, save for me. With average daily temperatures bobbing around the 60s, I had to stop myself from laughing each time I saw a Spanish person scurrying against the wind as a heap of scarves and knits.
For wholesome-midwestern me, my new home might as well have just denounced the use of seasons, with a climate like that. Normally I abided by the unspoken dress code of pants, and close-toed shoes, and socks, and a sweater, and a winter coat, and a scarf, and a-- what was I even doing? It was 60 degreeees outside. In January! People would normally be running around in their underwear (or something like that) if it was this beautiful outside.
So, one day I decided to dress up for no particular reason (other than the fact it was a Tuesday) and wear a new dress I had just bought with some funky eyeliner, oxfords, a cardigan, and... NO TIGHTS!
Of course, I had thought nothing of it as I left home that morning. I mean, it's not like I was going to die of hypothermia (or something like that).
Boy was that an interesting judgement call. Not the dying part, but the "thought nothing of it' stuff. While I was fine with my bare-calves (and okay, a teensy bit of thigh) going sans-tights, it became immediately evident that my classmates didn't feel the same.
People stared, boys whispered, and of course, I was asked whether or not I was cold more than a dozen times. I would start laughing as I explained my well-rehearsed justification of bearing my limbs in January.
"If there isn't snow on the ground, it's really not that cold". I began to tell any inquiring peers.
But then something happened. As the day went on, I realized that I had been totally ignoring all of the nice things people were telling me about my outfit. Instead, I had decided to transfix myself on being the only person in my school who didn't look like a Spanish eskimo. Obviously, that worked absolute wonders for my confidence.
So I changed my perspective. No, not completely. I'm not nearly powerful enough to do that. But I decided, from that moment in English class, I was going to parade around in that knee-revealing dress and (act) like I wasn't secretly plotting a way to create a make-shift shield out of my parka.
And then something even greater happened, it actually worked. The parka-shield didn't turn out, but somewhere along the way of acting like I didn't care about other people's grandmotherly advice, the whispers started to fade away (although I'm sure everyone had something better to talk about by that point), the boys went back to doing whatever boys do, and I felt damn good about myself. Granted, I was feeling a little bit chilly, but I made it through the remainder of my day with a boatload of newly-found confidence and (here's the best part), without hypothermia.
