**Dedicated to Willa Cowan-Essig, who without I would pushed me to love myself unconditionally**
When I started college, feminism wasn’t on my mind. I thought that feminism was just about women gaining rights in the workplace and I thought that all feminists were bra-burning hippies protesting Sephora. But in those nine months I learned a lot about what it really meant to be a feminist and for the next two years to follow I went on a wild ride of self-acceptance.
It all started with my first college boyfriend. Boyfriend is a tricky word, because in today’s hookup culture it’s meaning is cloudy. We were seeing each other regularly and I thought that at the time that things were exclusive. But he didn’t treat me the way that my friend’s boyfriends treated them. He would take any opportunity that he could to put me down, make me feel small, inexperienced, and painful naïve to adult life. He would say things like “if only I had met you six months from now” and would go on and on about how he wasn’t happy with our relationship because I didn’t meet his expectations. He would go on and on about his ex-girlfriend, going back and forth about how horrible he was and how he felt like he had lost the love of his life. At this point, any other girl would have said “see you never asshole”. But for some reason I wanted to keep trying and the more he treated me like shit, the more I wanted to prove to him that I could be the girl he wanted.
Before him, I really didn’t have any experience with dating men. This entire relationship was so fresh and exciting, being with him felt like being in a movie and I felt as if I was living out the college dream. But I was really in the middle of a nightmare. Everything that I did was wrong. When I would dye my hair or get a piercing, he would tell me that I was trying too hard and that his friends would make fun of the way that I looked. If I posted something I found empowering or feminist in any way on Facebook he would make me delete it because it embarrassed him. He told me that I couldn’t tell anyone that we were hooking up and that I would hold him back from meeting someone better. He threatened to hookup with my friends and even made moves on some of them. When things got physical, I thought that I had done something wrong and he told me that he was lashing out because of things he himself had experienced in the past. I was brainwashed, voiceless, and addicted to the abuse. It was like he was trying to be the stereotypical misogynist on purpose, but he had beat me down for months to believe that this is what I deserved. He made me feel that I didn’t have a voice or rights in the relationship and that it was a girls job to shut up and take what she is given with a smile.
Once summer hit, I was back home and I found out that he had met someone else. Someone who he treated very differently than me. He posted all about social media about how he had met his dream girl and for the next few months I began obsessing about his new, perfect relationship with a girl who he treated like a princess. I was heartbroken, not only because I had lost him but because he had done a complete 180 and was now “Mr. Perfect”. I couldn’t hold back the insecure thoughts and I would think to myself, “why me?”, “why had he treated me like this and worked so hard to make me feel terrible about myself?”. I can still remember a conversation with one of his good friends, who knew what a huge tool he was. We were talking about another girl that my ex had been with before me, who I was insanely jealous of. His friend said “we all felt so sorry for her that this was he first relationship in college.” and then mentioned nothing about how he was also my first relationship in college as well. This guy and his friends made it off like I deserved the way that I had been treated and that I wasn’t worthy of being in a relationship with someone who respected and cared about me. They saw me at as the girl who stuck around for longer than she should have, the one who they assumed would sleep with anyone who acted like a fuck boy, and was so insecure that she would put up with being emotionally dumped on for months at a time. I’m not going to skirt around the truth. I had made myself to be that girl and it was my own self-esteem that kept me in a toxic situation. It took years to get to a point where I could find the strength to love myself again, but I have turned the corner and I see a new person in the mirror.
It took a bit of mental rebounding to get to a point where I realized that I needed to start loving myself if I ever expected to love someone else. Self-love isn’t something one-dimensional, it takes respecting yourself in every single facet of your life from boys, to body positivity, even in your professional career. It has taken me a long time to accept that self-love is a life long process and that I can make things better for myself. It wasn’t a one woman job, I had a lot of help from my friends and even a few glamazons in six-inch heels and a cake-face of makeup.
Every single episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race ends with RuPaul saying, “If you can’t love yourself, how the in hell you gonna to love somebody else?”. On the surface the show, which follows a group of fishy and fabulous drag queens competing for a cash prize and the title of America’s Next Drag Superstar. With a show that centers on 13 drag queens, you’d expect the show to be all cat fights and drama, yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. Even though these performers have characters or drag egos which may have big over the top personalities that love to throw shade on their fellow queens, the real message behind the show is of love and acceptance. Every queen has something going on underneath the surface, whether it is family issues, body insecurities, hidden gender identities, health problems, or the never ending strife to prove to the world that they are good enough. Instead of making enemies out of each other, the queens help their fellow contestants to do their best on the main stage and encourage the other girls to give the competition all they’ve got. There is an unspoken sisterhood within the drag community and I believe that everyone, regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, or thoughts on glitter can learn a lot from drag queens. I know that I have.
Drag tells you that it is okay to have flaw, that our flaws are what makes us special to the world. Even though not every drag queen may have a body like Violet Chachki’s, makeup skills like Miss Fame, a runway walk like Raja, or quick wit like Bianca del Rio, they all work with what they have and own it. Loving yourself and overcoming difficult experiences is all about realizing that you aren’t able to change the past and that it’s okay not to be perfect. Can you image how boring it would be to watch 13 drag queens who all looked and acted the same? Hell no, it would be boring and unenjoyable. Drag queens taught me that it is okay to be myself and that no one should make me feel unlovable. They taught me that if I am ever going to succeed that I have to put my heart into it and never let anyone (or any man) get me down. Of course not all of my problems were solved by RuPaul’s Drag Race, but recognizing that I was a fierce, fabulous woman who don’t need no man was a very important step on my way to self-love and the appreciation of the feminist movement. There is no singular definition of what a feminist is and every feminist approaches women’s rights in a different way. And I can thank men in drag for teaching me that no matter what life throws at me that I do have the strength in side of me to stand up for myself and demand only the very best.