WHEN WE’RE OLDER, it MIGHT NOT be anymore Style

We might move from the brothers we loved to things more apt to represent our emotional and mental states. Tales like the darker, realist literary tale of Hans Christian Andersen, or the feminist retellings of Angela Carter and Anne Sexton echo new circumstances, providing a means to make sense of them. Regardless, the foundational tales are far from insignificant. We consume and create and essentially “story-fy” our lives because of that basis in didactic and transformative tales. We stick to what we know, using the media that taught us to understand ourselves to continue to do so.

There comes a time when no characters or worlds are specific or real enough except those inside our own heads. And so we imagine our own realities. We create languages when ours just won’t do, and we link people and things together in the most fantastical, genuine way that we can.

What distinguishes a tale is largely the way in which it is a simplification and a fantasy. The hero’s journey is plotable, sure, but still intentional. We see it in our lyrics, on our screens, and even in our news. We fit things to this form. Really, all stories, in essence, do this same thing. They make us feel things, think about things, examine things outside of ourselves that help us understand how we work internally. We can escape into their fraudulence enough to learn some fragile truth that, funnily enough, the real world is too muddled and mundane and limited to tell us.

So we bring the character tropes we’ve come to know so deeply into our sense of self. We see ourselves as characters working through plots that we loosely define and that all the other people and factors in our lives revise and reshape. This process of understanding shapes not only our introspection, but our expression. We recognize that just as we understand ourselves as caricatures, we impose those familiarities onto other people as well, and thus are also subject to those impositions. And so we seek refuge in the control that comes from putting on a particular image that aligns with our own sense of self, or a desired one.

The feeling as a child of wearing your princess dress or superhero uniform day after day isn’t a silly one, nor one that we lose. It allows us to internalize the feelings of strength and goodness that the external presents. And while our everyday tastes might change as our ruby red slippers turn into studded stilettos, or our tulle tutus into sharper suits, the sentiment still stems from that early internalization of the external.

In essence, we’re all still playing dress up. Some of us just pull from our closets options tamer than we used to, lacking the whimsy of our childhood costumes. That’s not a hard and fast rule nor one with any inherent meaning; we still treasure opportunities to turn into the characters we mold ourselves into. There are the cosplayers and the cowboys, the flappers and the flower children. Less obviously there are the styles we develop and the signature pieces or looks that allow us to take on the emotions that we learn in stories. The process isn’t about faking an identity — it’s about borrowing the qualities and writing the storylines that come with it. More so, it’s about better understanding your own complexity and nuance through the clarity and even simplification that this overt expression can provide.

WRITING Ali Rothberg