Dressed as a Man

I can remember the first time I intentionally dressed like a man. I was living in the Navy Yard, Brooklyn neightborhood in New York City. I was attempting to make it in New York, prior to when I was hired on as a Health Inspector for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. I was working so many different jobs, but just loving my life there having been in NY less than a year. Just 23 years old, first time living outside of my home state of Indiana and soaking it all up with fellow transplants to the city. Including my two roommates, who I of course met on Craigslist. (We ultimately decided to become roommates thanks to a few Facebook posts I had made about the movie ELF starring Will Ferrell).

I had taken a job as an assistant manager of a fancy fitness club in the NYU district. I remember Ivanka Trump was a member and I caught a few glimpses of her on some very early morning shifts. (No, I 100% do not support her or her father if you were wondering). These were the shifts that required me to be at the gym at 4:30AM in order to have it open for its members by 5am. You see a lot of interesting stuff happening aroudn the city at this hour. On more than one occassion I had to ask an unhoused person to please move to the side so that I could open the door of the gym. I always felt bad askign them to move, but I couldn't not do my job. Any time this happened, I never had a bad interaction, but it was still frightening as a small 23 year old woman barely knowing the city. I did however know how to navigate the subway system farely well - and keep in mind, this was before most people had smart phones (I ended up getting one while in NYC becuase it's convenience for navigating the subways/busses). We used a website called, HopStop, to get us around. We would look up the directions the night before, write them down and go - it was the public transportation version of MapQuest. Once you got used to your route after a couple times, you typically knew where to go - and if you didn't, you could just ask someone, because it's true - New Yorkers love to give directions of the trains. It's like a right of passage or something when becoming a New Yorker - or so it seems. I had memorized the route to the fancy gym from my aparatment in the Navy Yard, Brooklyn to the Westside of Manhattan. It took just under an hour (about 50 minutes) to get to the gym from my apartment. This meant, yes, i was leaving my house at 3:30am. Leaving at this time of night from anywhere can feel eerie. But, I had to walk through one of the largest housing projects in Brooklyn in order to get ot my train. It wasn't exactly known as a safe neighborhood. I once had a man come up to me to ask, "Yo do you wanna buy some crack?" and I said, "Naw, I goitta go to work," We did a little handshake and went on our ways. (This is. acommonly known shake where you slap hands then bend fingers to lock then let go and snap). It has escaped my mind whether or not I had this job before my time as a health inspector or after. But after I became a health inspector, I didn't spend too much time in NY (Because the West Coast stole my heart after my first visit there in 2011 to Joshua Tree National Park and Red Rocks Conservation Area in Nevada). Then, I began to dress like a man only because of the clothes that were available/required for recreating and working in the outdoors. Don't get me started on the lake of color options for "female" outdoor clothing options. When I first began to dive more into the world of rock climbing and outdoor recreation, I was always one of very few girls in each adventure I had. Often times I was the only girl. In the past, I had always only had girlfriends, so this was new for me. Learning to hang with the boys and hold my own. But, as many of you may have guessed - because you've experienced it, many of those all-guy groups had at least one if not two men vying for my attention outside of friendship. Sometimes, I decided to play along and give it a try - other times I was just annoyed. I just wanted to be able to be with a group of girls and talk about whatever we wanted and wear whatever we wanted and not be left behind on the trail by the rest of our group because our legs were too short. (I honestly think this is how I became so good with route finding on the trail - constantly being left alone because the boys were always so gung-ho to hike fast). That all being said - I knew there was a world where women did recreate like this together and were able to be their feral weird selves all the time with no reservations. I just had to find it...or create it.