The converse too

If I could have parts of the past versions of myself back, 

I wonder which I would take. 

I think that people molding themselves intentionally is why we have dictators and tyrants,

also goth phases.

I think that by wanting to show someone who you are so bad,

we put on display the person who we think they might want and forget ourselves in the process.

The fine line between an identity crisis and a pair of mom jeans is simple-

one side is unsure while the other would like to mask the fact that they are too.

I went through some drawers in my high school bedroom, 

and I spent a concerning amount of hours wondering how I didn't care so much.

Not in the compassionate age, but rather in who I was. 

In every brightly colored dress that I would wear tackily with combat boots,

I saw that I never had to try to be happy,

and that with the shifts in my mind and my chest that I stopped conveying,

none of that changed. 

A new age of mom jeans (which are shockingly not jeans that my mother would wear)

seemed to have kicked aside the freedom that being a miserable teenager can provide. 

No, I don't believe that clothes are the key to some third eye that makes you special,

but I do give a nod to the people that we were when people were looking, 

but simultaneously weren't because we weren't looking for them,

tried to be whatever their intuition told them to be. 

We looked for us.

Not being able to hop onto trends,

or assimilate with how cool people like to think they are was a gift. 

At 18 I think I might have returned it with everything else I thought I wouldn't need for college, 

but fortunately people are a bit too busy buying air force one's for them to notice me behind them, as per usual, and as per tradition.