Coming Out of Hiding... a personal story

More than once, as a teenager, I was mistaken for a boy. At the time, it was embarrassing … in fact it still is. Perhaps it was because when I was growing up, I never learned how to put on make-up or even how to dress like a girl. Truthfully, I chose not to learn. My mother said I was a “tom-boy” (big surprise), and the whole idea of "style" made me extremely uncomfortable-- "terrified" might be a better word--so I avoided it altogether, preferring instead to dress in comfortable often loose clothes. Somehow I got it in my head that style and comfort were mutually exclusive. I didn’t realize it at the time, and the decades that followed, that I was choosing to hide. Clothes were not about celebrating, they were a way of hiding the feminine part of myself… a part I saw as weak and vulnerable. That way of viewing the feminine changed. I've spent the decades since understanding that Earth needs the feminine to reemer