All dressed up and nowhere to go...

So here I am, sitting in the basement cooling my retro heels and wearing my plum colored open-weave tights and velvet and beads with my hair up for the first time in months...ren faire aside, and succumbing to a healthy dose of self-pity. Or introspection...one of the two. It might have something to do with the fact that everyone I know in the area is either working tonight, or is out of state, and, not wanting to go out alone, I found myself cleaning the washroom tonight. In heels. Now, to put this in perspective, the washroom (a bathroom not given that name on account of it not having a bathtub or shower, and more importantly, adjacent to my room...and the kitchen, but I digress) anyway, the washroom is a room that, even though I am the only one who really uses it, I hate to clean. Normally I put off cleaning it for so long that my Mom ends up doing it. The whole situation is odd, and rather irresponsible of me, but I will not lie...I have always hated cleaning the washroom. Yet tonight, it seemed like I couldn't stop myself, and it wasn't even that messy in the grand sceme of things, but I cleaned the whole thing as if on autopilot. And then I just stood there in the washroom, staring in the mirror for what felt like ages, and I could barely recognize myself...

It happens often, actually...I'll look in the mirror and have to look twice to make sure it's really me. It's really wierd, especially after doing several self-portraits, you'd think I'd be used to my face. I don't pretend to understand the phsycological reasoning behind it, but I think it's why I'm always fascinated by mirrors. I always used to imagine they were really like Alice, and the world behind the mirror was totally different from my own, and that the girl who was me in the mirror was someone else too. Maybe I played "let's pretend" too often when I was little. 

I often wonder what I would be like if I hadn't been homeschooled. If I had been able to wear what I wanted from a young age. Sometimes I think that I dress the way I do now as a reaction to not being able to buy what I wanted until I was fourteen. Until then my Mom made almost everything I wore, and I always had to wear skirts out of the house. It wasn't really until I was sixteen that I was able to wear pants as often as I wanted. I didn't even touch make-up until I was seventeen. It just wasn't in the house...my Mom never used any, in fact, she was quite against make-up, and my sister had no interest. I know it's because of all that that when I was fourteen-seventeen, I really just wanted to "fit in" and look like everyone else. I tried really hard to look and act like everyone else.

So I look in the mirror now, and see myself in dark eye make-up and wearing an outfit that could be in Fruits and completely unlike anything the "normal" twenty-year-old would wear, and I know that if a picture of me was taken and sent back in time ten years, I wouldn't ever think it could be me.