It all started when I dyed my hair green.  

I had never dyed my hair before, aside from some tame and ill-advised highlights in high school. I didn’t have any tattoos; I didn’t even have my ears pierced, thanks to an infection in both ears when I was a kid. My hair—light brown, untameable, curly underneath but infuriatingly straight on top—was as unremarkable as the rest of me. Plain. Mousy. 

Maybe it was my self-esteem that had gone from low to non-existent after an earth-shatteringly bad breakup. Maybe it was just boredom. I’ll never know. Either way, one night, my friend ushered me into his bathroom, draped a beach towel around my shoulders, and dyed half of my head emerald green. 

The effect was instantaneous: I looked in the mirror, at the green-splattered towel, at my damp mess of hair, at my friend wide-eyed and grinning knowingly behind me, and I was changed.

***

When I was a kid, my mom worked at a department store, so, naturally, all my (heavily discounted) clothes came from there. I looked like how I felt: straightlaced and exceedingly Catholic. My moral compass pointed unfailingly north, and try as I might to shake it, I failed every time. I was a Good Girl, a rule-following girl, a straight girl. Even in college, I was carefully curated, cautiously cute. I was freckled and skinny with a bad haircut and a huge smile. Easily digestible.

After I graduated, I began to feel like a different person, largely because I realized I wasn’t straight. I should have known earlier—as a child, I stared far too long at the ingenue’s corseted bosom in movie musicals. But in my early 20s, I tragically fell in love with a female friend, and then sloppily ended our friendship instead of confessing my feelings. She had a boyfriend. I had only cowardice. 

But when my depression began to explode like a dying star, and my body began to change, I didn’t know who I was anymore. Everyone else seemed to have a sense of self, an idea of which choices were best for them, and reflected their values, and brought them joy. I had none of that. I had a handful of antidepressants, a confusing interest in women, and the unshakable knowledge that I didn’t know a goddamn thing about myself. About the world. About anything at all. 

When I saw myself in the mirror with green hair, something shifted. I was 27. The worst of my depression had mercifully passed, but only after years of soul-crushing torment. I had been fired from jobs, been dumped, lost friendships, fumbled so many opportunities. But I’d also been in recovery for my mental illness. I was medicated and in therapy. I had found people who loved me. 

Maybe, I reasoned as I checked myself out in the mirror, I could try to love myself, too. 

It wasn’t easy, mostly because I wasn’t thin anymore. That was a privilege I had carried for most of my life. When I started to gain weight, I was unsurprised, but I still panicked. I didn’t realize how much of my self-worth was tied into my thinness until I was no longer thin. And I certainly didn’t realize how emotional I would become, how much it felt like I was grieving the loss of my smaller self. 

Once upon a time, it seemed like the simplest way to love myself was to thank my body for being small. But it wasn’t, not anymore. I took up more space now. I kept growing out of my clothes. Stretch marks spiderwebbed across my hips and lower stomach. People in my life noticed and commented, and I wished I could drink a potion and shrink, fall back down into the rabbit hole of thinness. 

It didn’t help that I went to school for theatre and was working as an actor in the city. In school, I struggled to get cast in shows, and often felt like I didn’t have any talent at all. Existing in a larger body shook my confidence even more. What kind of roles would I get cast as now? Was I still castable when there was so much more of me to watch, to analyze, to criticize? 

Years ago, I was in rehearsal when the director paraded out dozens of beautiful ball gowns. My castmates giggled and squealed, tripping over themselves to try on all of the dresses. I smiled and kept to the sidelines as I felt my heart melt into my stomach. Only one of the dresses was anywhere near my size. In that moment, I despised myself: my round face, my awful hair, and especially my body, all protruding tummy and thick thighs and wide hips. It was one of the first times I felt a shockingly pure hatred for my body, and, unfortunately, it wasn’t the last. 

I didn’t expect fashion to shepherd me towards an acceptance of my body. I had always admired queer fashion, how it encouraged the wearer to be as unapologetically themselves externally as they were on the inside. But, on the streets of Chicago and on social media, I began to notice fat fashion—especially the holy combination of both, fat queer fashion. These bodies didn’t shrink: they flaunted and flirted, paraded and proclaimed, strutted and sassed. Soon, my social media feeds were cleansed of gaunt models and fitness influencers and were gloriously filled with queer and fat people. With these people to model myself after, I didn’t feel ashamed—I felt a thrill of inspiration. 

After all, I had green hair. Like a neon beacon on the top of my head, it invited the attention I had been too afraid to ask for. I didn’t want to shrink anymore and disappear: I was practically demanding that my hair be noticed. And if that were the case, why wouldn’t I want the rest of me to be looked at, too?

***
When I went to the club one summer night, I wore all black. Black pleather mini skirt, black tank top, black boots, fishnets. Black eyeliner. Black lipstick. 

I was with two of my best friends–one of them the friend who had dyed my hair. With my green hair, I felt powerful, even when I saw my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend in the crowd, even when I clambered onto the platform full of much smaller dancing people. And when a beautiful girl asked to dance with me, and then to kiss me—my first kiss with another woman—I felt invincible. My past self felt like a ghost leaving my body. It was no longer a curse that I didn’t look like “the old me” anymore: it was a blessing. An opportunity. An emergence. 

The Good Girl had finally died, allowing me to be reborn into whoever the hell I wanted to be. 

When I remembered how powerful I felt in my all-black that night, how complete I felt when I dyed my hair green, how confident the fat queer people on my social media feeds looked, I began to wonder how my outward expression could reflect my inner self. I started buying clothes in a variety of colors, first, challenging myself to stick only to an all-black outfit when it felt purposeful. I had fallen into wearing dark colors to camouflage my curves, but I wasn’t hiding anymore. 

I posted an outfit to my Instagram story for the first time without much thought. But when I began sharing my outfits regularly, three or four or five times a week, I noticed a pattern. I posted when I felt good about myself, yes, but also when I looked… Not normal. Not “good.” Not thin. And definitely not straight.

I paired baggy shirts and sweaters with leggings and combat boots. I packed bright yellow eyeshadow onto my lids. Crop tops became a staple part of my wardrobe; a pair of white faux snakeskin ankle boots worked their way into a regular rotation. I posted outfits that made me look amazing, and outfits that made me look, objectively, like shit. I craved colors that clashed. I loved textures and patterns that shouldn’t have gone together. I never even learned to do my hair, letting it wave and curl and frizz in an uncontrollable mane, or tangle into a knot on top of my head. My past self, in her perfectly matched Elder-Beerman separates, wouldn’t have even recognized me. 

My fatness, my queerness, my depression, my disappointment, my joy and curiosity, my confusion, my lack of and constant search for identity: I let it all color the choice of what I put on my body. And I kept posting photos onto social media, because I wanted people to see me, finally, for who I was excited to be.  

***

I don’t have green hair anymore; it’s back to its virgin brown. But I daydream about the next color I’ll dye it. I don’t kiss girls anymore; I’m married to a man now and content with monogamy. But I know my queerness is still valid, still a part of me I want to explore and express and celebrate. I can’t fit into my jeans from college, but I don’t need that girl anymore. I’m someone else, now. I’m someone brighter and bolder, bigger and better.

“I love your outfit!” a girl at Starbucks said to me one morning. I wore a black off-the-shoulder bodysuit and pinstriped black-and-white pants that tied at the waist. A bronze pendant of a sword dangled from my neck. I had looked in the mirror before I left, posted the look onto social media, and grinned with hot pink-painted lips.

I looked fat. I looked queer. I looked fucking incredible. 

About the Author

Dani Mohrbach (she/her) is a writer and actor. Her deeply personal writing explores her experiences with mental health and wellness, queerness, identity, relationships, and nerd culture. After spending six years in Chicago, she now lives in LA with her husband and their two zany cats.