At my high school graduation, on a swelteringly hot day in June, I wore black.

The field house where all the graduates-to-be were waiting in lines for the ceremony to commence was a conglomeration of the colour white, speckled with the deep emerald polyester of billowing graduation gowns. Tradition and implicit social norms explicate the wearing of white. The unconventional girls who do not wear white are typically adorned in equally summery shades of lilac, rose, or lemon yellow; perhaps even vermilion, for the more daring of the flock. Boys are invariably dressed in khakis and a light button down. Girls almost exclusively wear heels, wedges or platforms, stiletto if she’s feeling a bit risqué. 

Sure as the blistering sun that beat down upon our bare necks that afternoon in June, the graduating class of 2017 showed up wearing white.

I felt a curious sense of composure upon walking into the torrid atmosphere of the crowded field house. We were to remain there in our jumbled, intermingling queues for a sweaty hour until the school’s auditorium grew full and heavy with the din of our eager families awaiting the start of the ceremony.

All four years of high school were rife with unease. High school provided me with easily the most awkward, frustrating, uncomfortable, nerve-wracking, and downright painful years of my existence. I spent two solid years depressed, all four anxious and worried (with or without direct cause), and almost everyday I fretted over the narrow, and ultimately irrelevant, social standards I thought I was to follow in order to be accepted. By whom? To what end? I now wonder. Because, at the conclusion of it all, at the grand finale in which I stood, enrobed in emerald green polyester, everything emerged suddenly and laughably clear.

So beneath my gown, the one that made me indistinguishable among the 524 graduates on every side of me, I wore black.

Call it a final act of defiance, not necessarily against the school itself, but against everything I felt during my time there. Call it an outfit of mourning, for the death of four festering, bleak years. Call it eccentricity. Call it a cry for attention. Call it “I-didn’t-own-a-white-dress.” 

For those four years I floundered in my own identity– most of us did, whether we admit it or not. Every version of myself that I clung to was wrong, every fleeting sense of confidence easily swept away by the slightest breeze. It was in writing and travel that I found stability and self-assurance. It was not until senior year that I realised I needn’t force myself so cruelly to find those things elsewhere.

We attach ourselves so desperately to conventions, to points of reference that seem “right” or “proper” or most popular, that we are driven perpetually further from true happiness. Newsflash: you will never be truly happy if you are doing something for appearances or solely to please others. Perhaps this seems obvious–even when I was a self-denying sophomore I would’ve blindly concurred with such a statement– but the weight of it is only realised through the discovery of that intangible joy, the one that only comes with fearless originality and the courage to embody your authentic self.

Listen to your intuition. That underlying sensation, the innate, unshakeable tug you feel  when a choice is to be made, when something is about to occur– that’s your gut, your intuition. It knows you better than you believe you know yourself. Follow it. I dare you.

2017 is the year I made the best and most frightening decision of my life. In January, the very same day I was accepted, I committed to Trinity College Dublin without a shadow of doubt (thanks, intuition, for making the college process so easy!). Moving abroad was a bizarre and uncommon choice. It was not, as you might imagine, preferable to many others. It scared the shit out of me, and it scared even more shit out of my parents. But if I didn’t move to Ireland, if I didn’t follow this unfettered, headstrong intuition of mine, I would never have been shaken so deeply to my core, awakening a sense of self I never knew I had sleeping softly within me.

2017 is the year I graduated high school and also the year I wrote the epilogue to my childhood, closing Volume I of my multi-volume life entirely. It is the year I:

had my heart broken twice,

got accepted into my dream university,

was bold enough to wear red lipstick,

got sunburnt in Glasgow,

learned how to do a deadlift,

touched my palms against the Western Wall,

travelled to four different countries,

completed my first term of college (!!!) abroad (!!!),

rode a camel named Bertha,

moved to Dublin,

participated in three different marches for social/political reform,

changed my name,

spilled red wine on a ceiling in Madrid,

fell in love,

ate a mince pie for the first time,

won a game of pool at 3am at a hostel in Edinburgh,

started and finished and rewatched every episode of Rick & Morty, every episode of How I Met Your Mother, and countless episodes of The Office,

floated in the Dead Sea (and got salt rocks in uncomfortable places),

acquired my first (and second, third, and fourth) tattoo,

cried in an airport alone at 5 in the morning,

realised my parents are the most incredible human beings and I’m beyond blessed to have them supporting such outrageous dreams as mine,

and for the first time ever, lived truly, authentically, and happily in the present moment, amid all that madness.

I can say with utter sincerity that this has been the most transformative, chaotic, and enriching year of my life.

That pitiful feeling of wanting to blend into a crowd, to be a bird among the flock, to wear the colour white– it’s disappearing in the rearview mirror. When I stepped into my black dress on the day of graduation, a quiver of that old social anxiety tickled in my stomach. I knew it was abnormal, perhaps even unsuitable. They’ll think I’m goth. Or weird. Or nuts. But I was already changing. The truth was already so palpably, unmistakably, irrevocably clear.

And I haven’t been afraid to wear black ever since.