Every morning, I wake up and put my uniform on before going to school. When I get to school, I see all the other people wearing the same set of clothes I am, whether it be a white oxford with blue corduroys, a blue polo with khakis, or a gray skort and yellow oxford. The uniform is meant as a means to make the student body more homogeneous. It is meant to prevent students from making judgments about their peers’ clothing and general appearance.
And yet, none of us look alike. There are ways to make a uniform look more presentable with the sweaters we wear, or the accessories we use to adorn it. We can style our hair differently or put on mismatching socks. It doesn’t matter. We can personalize our uniform just as if we were wearing our normal clothes.
So it should not be that unreasonable, then, to understand that the stereotypes we so desperately try to avoid at this school still exist. We make judgments about the tacky pairs of shoes, or the way someone’s presenting themselves, or their personal beliefs. The entire idea that some people have that we are safe, as Webb students, from being sorted into groups is preposterous.
I am bringing this to your attention, because, frankly, I’m tired of this. I don’t want to go to school wondering who’s going to be making fun of me now, or getting paranoid when I walk past a group of students. I want to be able to express myself without hearing someone put me down. I know that laughs are expected when you, say, dance on stage to a song that makes you look absolutely ridiculous, but when it comes to serious matters such as the Day of Silence, an event that I led at school for the national day of silent protest against the bullying of homosexuals, I don’t want to face baseless ridicule.
We cannot truly be accepted and free until we learn to accept everybody. In 7th grade, at advisor lunch, I started talking about the book I was reading at the time, a book entitled Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, in which the protagonist shoots herself in the face because she is tired of being pretty. I started telling my classmates about why I liked the book, but my ideas were shot down.
“Why would she do that? Every girl wants to be pretty. That’s ridiculous! You must want to shoot your face off, huh?” …Well, not exactly, I just wanted to say that I liked the book and admired the girl for doing what she did. I was silent the rest of that lunch. And for the following lunches, actually. Most of my opinions were ridiculed without even being voiced.
And it’s not just our ideas. Even though we share the same dress code as the rest of our classmates, we can still make assumptions about each other.
After I cut my hair to a short length, rumors started spreading around that I was a lesbian. Apparently, not wanting to care for your hair much anymore and deciding to chop it all off means you’re attracted to women. It doesn’t help that I don’t have a boyfriend at this school or that I support the rights of homosexuals in general, especially with the Day of Silence I led at the school. I am still ridiculed for my bright colored necklaces that apparently mean I’m gay.
In a school where we supposedly encourage freedom of thought, with students who constantly complain about not having enough rights, the student body is surprisingly rough on their fellow students. And it’s not just me. I’ve had friends and relatives reduced to tears over things their classmates have said to them or ridiculed them for, and it’s time to stop.
It may be the way we look. It may be the way we talk or the way we say our ideas or just the way the rest of the school sees us. We blend into the crowd with our uniforms, though we don’t want to. Our ideas and voices are like the accessories we use to brighten our uniforms, to make us different, but they keep getting stifled and we just blend in again.
I don’t want to blend in. I’m a deathly afraid of it. I want to be remembered. I am so much more than my uniform. I’m so much more than my bracelets and my mismatched socks and my short hair. I don’t want to be stopped in the hall by someone so they can ask me if I’m gay. I don’t want someone to come up to me and tell me that I should let my hair grow out because it makes me look like a boy and that’s just not right. I want to be able to express myself, and I think that everyone should be able to as well.
The uniform that I put on every morning is the same dress code that everyone else wears, but that does not mean that we are the same. We need to expand our boundaries. This is my official plea not only to the student body, but to people everywhere—accept everyone. You would like to have your opinion acknowledged, and so do the rest of us. We will never have the freedom to express ourselves until everyone does, no matter how controversial they are.
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