I've been drafting up a post about how realizing I'm a girl was apparently the secret ingredient I needed to reignite my growth as an artist, and I briefly contemplated going all the way back to middle school (when I started my first real sketchbook) with the examples, before deciding that was getting well beyond the scope of the chost's original intent. But, when looking through that first sketchbook, I noticed something kinda mind-boggling:
Now, it's possible I'm wrong about this,1 but I'm reasonably certain that these are the exact same pair of black cargo pants, drawn more than 12 years apart. The first drawing is from when I was a 13-year-old "boy"2, drawn so I'd have an image to pin on my DeviantArt profile. I am now a 25-year-old woman, having drawn that second image for the sake of a meme on Cohost, a site that didn't exist back then and of which I'm quite fond because it reminds me of Tumblr, a website I didn't even start using until nearly a year after that first image (October 2011). I am wearing these cargo pants right now, and they are comfy. What the fuck.
I should probably note that there was a long, long interim period, like maybe sometime around 2015 to literally just earlier this year, where I only wore denim cargo pants and never any other kind, since by coincidence a large portion of my wardrobe was also black t-shirts and black hoodies and "all-black outfits all the time" didn't fit the vibe I was trying to give off, and the brown and khaki varieties of cargo pants felt even frumpier to me than cargo pants are normally considered to be3. AFAIK I don't have any self-portraits of myself in those denim cargo pants, which probably ties into my feeble attempts at performing masculinity (which roughly coincided with the cargo jeans completely dominating my wardrobe) having ruined my already subpar self-esteem - there's a noticeable gap in my proper self-portraits that starts somewhere around the end of high school and finally ends somewhere around late 2022, which matches up incredibly well with my attempts to be more masculine (growing a beard and combing my hair differently, ca. August 2015) and my eggshell finally breaking in full (October 2022).
- If I am wrong, then the other explanation would be that at some point I got another pair in the same style, but a larger size, which is entirely possible considering I went from "kinda skinny" in middle school to, uh, ｗｉｄｅ in high school, and would explain why they still fit me well despite being about as heavyset as I ever was in high school and college. It still says a lot about my fashion sense (or lack thereof), though.
- I'm using scare quotes for "boy" here because let's be honest, if I went back in time and pointed out all the evidence of my girlhood to my younger self, teenage me would probably have a pretty big "oh shit" moment. (Setting aside the "oh shit" moment caused by finding out time travel becomes a thing in my lifetime for the sake of this hypothetical, mind you.)
- I like them, but apparently they're regarded as lame? Or maybe that's just cargo shorts that get a bad rap. Either way, I like having a lot of pockets, though admittedly they were more relevant when I also carried around a glasses case at all times, and then later when I replaced that with carrying around my 3DS at all times. It's nice for not having to clutter two pockets4 with a pencil AND a phone AND a pair of earbuds AND my keys AND my wallet, though.
- I hate using my buttock-pockets for anything thicker than a folded-up piece of paper, and even then I'd rather keep things like that in a different pocket. I'm like the princess and the pea, but the pea is my wallet and the pile of mattresses is my dumptruck ass, which is a deliberately terrible analogy because I really don't get why people put up with having anything substantial in those pockets. Do y'all motherfuckers never sit down or something?