Ajnabieh - The Foreigner

It's Dress Your Best time again over at Academichic! For those who weren't around last year, this is a blog challenge to think of your fashion sense as not concealing your faults, but as celebrating the great things about your body--an attempt to reorient one's thinking about the body and fashion from negative to positive. I'm always a fan of playing, and hope I'll have at least a couple of outfits to post. (You can read my posts from last year here.)

Anyway, this is an outfit I wore to a coffee meeting a week or so back, when it was meltingly hot in NYC:



I have no idea where any of the items came from originally. But I wanted to talk about my love of the knee-length skirt, because of how much it shows off my legs. I'm a little sensitive about them, because my legs are asymetrical and visibly scarred. I had extensive leg surgery as an adolescent, a total of three different operations, on both legs and hips. Although many of my scars are perfectly straight, the one on the front of my left leg most certainly is not, and is dark enough in several places that it is visible unless I use cover-up makeup on it. (I can sometimes even see it through stockings.) Also as a result of my surgery, my muscles on the left leg don't lay precisely where the muscles on my right leg lay. I also have a limp which only really gets noticeable when I'm tired or injured. The appearance of my legs was, for a long time, a source of stress for me, and I wore long pants to cover them, or even used concealer on the dark parts of my scars.

I'm looking at my legs different these days: I can walk. I can walk, and I have strong, muscular legs that carry me around my city. My surgeon said that his goal for me, after surgery, was to be able to run for a bus. I can do that; I can run across the street when the light starts changing before I get to the corner and damn if I'm waiting another five minutes. I can stand on the subway, usually, at least. And so, if I realize my knees and ankles are going out a good ten years before they should, because of the stress and strain they've undergone; or if I get asked, again, if I did something to my leg; or if I've got these long scars written down my skin, I've stopped minding, and I've started being proud. They're my legs, and I earned them. And when there comes a day again when I need assistance to walk--and I have no illusions that I'll make the rest of my life unassisted, not on these legs--well, then. They're still going to be my legs.



The other comment I have here is on my sunglasses. Aviator frames are new to me; I never thought I could wear them. I think I thought that because I associated them with my dad; he wore both aviator glasses for regular wear, and aviator sunglasses, for as long as I can remember. In fact, these are his sunglasses, which he forgot at my house last summer when he came up to visit.

I'm wearing them now because my dad passed away, quite suddenly, in May. I look better in these glasses than I thought I would, but I think I'd be wearing them regardless.