For all those years I prayed that you'd go away for good/ Half the time afraid that you really would

Mission creep: this has nothing to do with reading.

I always think about street harassment in the spring and fall. This is because street harassment picks up in the spring, I guess because we're not all wearing shape disguising coats and running to escape the cold. Then I get used to it as the summer wears on. Come fall, though, I occasionally wear knee-high boots with booty shorts and fishnets.

The other day after getting some fairly graphic street harassment, I was reflecting on this. Nothing justifies street harassment, and I get crap no matter how I dress. That said, it does get noticeably worse in the fall with this outfit choice.

I didn't used to dress this way for trapeze. When I first started I wore things like this:

Not sexy!

Now, I wear things like this:

And this:

Which I realize don't look all that sexy, but with boots on the street, they come off more sexy than I intend.

So, why dress unintentionally sexy for trapeze? It's sort of ironic, actually, given what got me started with trapeze in the first place. I'm not totally sure how to explain it; I guess some is just about coming to be more comfortable with my body than I ever have been before. Coming to see my body as about what it can do and not how it looks has strangely enough led me to a place where I'm not self-conscious about wearing things like this, and I can truly just wear clothes that are pretty and make me happy while flying.

I don't like that it comes with street harassment, but living in DC does, and it is what it is. The benefit of discovering that I love flying in fishnets just like I discovered that I can regularly do something that terrifies me for the sake of the highs it gives me seems on balance worth it.