Every time I used to walk toward the front doors of a Catholic church, I became acutely aware of my own silhouette. It didn’t matter whether the occasion was a baptism, a confirmation, a wedding, or a funeral. Somewhere between the gravel of the parking lot and the heavy, medieval-looking oak doors, my clothes suddenly felt incredibly loud.

The women floated past me in floral chiffons and linens, looking like people who had received an instructional memo at birth that I had somehow missed. The men adjusted their suit jackets and straightened their ties with the quiet, unbothered confidence of people who had never once questioned whether their wardrobe choices might offend the Creator of the Universe. I stood somewhere between them in pressed slacks and a stiff button-down shirt, feeling a little like a secret agent.

Nobody ever stopped me at the entrance. There was no dress-code bouncer checking hemlines or gender markers. They didn’t have to. By then, I had already absorbed enough of the fine print, enough passing comments and side glances from pew-sitters, and enough general cultural static to wonder if people like me were actually allowed past the lobby. Every church carried the same quiet, absurdly specific question: Does God really care that I don’t fit neatly into either side of the seating chart?

I remember walking past the holy water near the entrance and having the distinct, intrusive thought that if I dipped my fingers in, it might start to bubble and hiss like acid.

There is a picture in one of my mother’s cherished photo albums of a little girl standing in front of the tree in our front yard, looking less like a child and more like a tactical hostage. She is wearing a smocked Easter dress with a crisp white collar, white tights that itch just to look at, a wide brimmed Easter hat, and shiny black patent leather shoes. If you look closely at her face, she isn’t smiling as much as she is executing a masterclass in human endurance.

My mother absolutely loved to put me in dresses…and barrettes. Smocked bodices, Christmas velvets, pastel linens that wrinkled if I breathed too hard. I hated them with a passion that bordered on theological. I hated fancy holidays, I hated formal rituals, and I hated any event that required an RSVP. Weddings, bar mitzvahs, homecoming dances, all of them elaborate traps designed to keep me contained.

The family narrative suggests I was well-behaved in those pictures, but that is a lie. The moment the camera flash went off, the compliance ended. I would rip the plastic barrettes out of my scalp, taking fistfuls of my own hair with them. I spent every formal event engulfed in a cloud of blinding jealousy, watching my brother instantly run off into the grass to play tag with the boys in his comfortable pants. He got to move, while I was inconveniently packaged….there is no playing comfortably in tights. If I fell or ran too hard, they ripped and I’d have to spend the remainder of the fancy afternoon with gravel in my knees .

I can still recall the exact physical misery of those fancy events, the stiff lace scratching the underside of my chin like steel wool, the vicious, blistering pinch of patent leather against my heels. When I did stand still, it was because movement threatened to compromise the structural integrity of an outfit I had been told was beautiful but always felt like a cage.

Even at six years old, I remember thinking the dress belonged to an entirely different child. It wasn’t a dramatic realization. I didn’t throw myself onto the ground or scream. I simply wore them because that’s what girls did, and when you are small, you assume that the general discomfort of existence is entirely your own fault. I figured everyone felt this strange inside their skin. I assumed every other little girl was also holding her breath, mutually participating in a hostage situation, waiting for permission to take the costume off.

It takes a remarkably long time to realize that some people actually like wearing dresses.

When I moved to New Jersey after college, I found myself dropped directly into a dense colony of Catholic Italians. These were not the quiet, solemn kind of Catholics who slipped into a pew for forty-five minutes on Sunday morning and vanished into the night. These were people whose entire calendar, social hierarchy, and digestive tracts revolved around the neighborhood church. Baptisms, first communions, confirmations, weddings, feast days—the church was the absolute center of gravity for the entire community.

Every summer, the street directly in front of the church would shut down completely and transform into a block party of feasting and festivity. Beer trucks parked directly beside marble statues of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. Elderly women with flour dusting their foreheads arguing passionately in Italian while dumping five pounds of powdered sugar onto fresh, boiling-hot zeppoles. Children darting through the crowds clutching fistfuls of raffle and ride tickets, and someone’s heavy-breathing uncle always shouted over a crackling loudspeaker about the money wheel. The air smelled of fried dough, grilled sausage, and cigar smoke all at the same time.

I absolutely loved the summer feasts. They taught me that religion could create a fierce, aggressively generous community entirely separate from its actual rules. I wasn’t drawn to the theology, but I was deeply drawn to the people. They fed each other. They remembered everyone’s birthdays. They showed up with massive aluminum trays of baked ziti when someone died, and they celebrated new babies with enough carb-heavy food to feed a small army. That part of the faith made complete, beautiful sense to me. 

The sanctuary, however, remained an architectural panic attack.

Every invitation to a church event triggered the exact same wardrobe crisis. I would stand in front of my closet for hours trying to figure out how to dress appropriately while still aligned to who I was authentically. The women wore dresses and heels. The men wore suits. I looked at both options and felt entirely homeless. I wasn’t trying to make a political statement. I wasn’t trying to rebel or provoke the altar guild. I simply wanted to disappear into something that didn’t feel like a theatrical wardrobe choice. A crisp button-down shirt. Tailored slacks. Comfortable shoes that actually felt like they belonged to my feet. I wanted clothes that allowed me to breathe without wondering whether my very presence was making someone else uncomfortable.

More than once, well-meaning friends tried to solve my spiritual outsider status by encouraging me to officially join up.

“You should just get baptized,” they’d say over wine and antipasti. “Do it for the gifts.”

I don’t think they realized how profoundly bizarre that sounded to my ears. Envelopes of cash from distant family, a nice leather Bible with my name embossed in gold foil on the cover,  someone’s Uncle Tony could make me a gold cross necklace because he was a jeweler. They wanted to focus on the spoils that happened after the ceremony.

But I heard something entirely different. I used to look at them and wonder what they believed the water actually did. Was it just a public declaration? A neighborhood membership card? Or did they truly believe that something inside a human being genuinely mutated beneath the surface of the font? If it changed you, what exactly was the output? Would I emerge from the water suddenly desiring sundresses? Would I stop noticing women before I noticed men? Would the quiet, persistent ache I’d carried since childhood simply dissolve into the plumbing?

I never asked those questions aloud. They felt almost blasphemous, even inside the privacy of my own skull. But shame has a brilliant way of disguising itself as intellectual curiosity. I wasn’t trying to understand the nuances of Catholic theology nearly as much as I was trying to figure out if there was a loophole inside the system, some magical ritual where God might still be willing to rewrite the baseline code of who I was.

The older I became, the more I realized I wasn’t waiting for a sacrament. I was just waiting for someone to give me permission to exist.

I already believed in God. I just didn’t believe in the version of God that seemed to require so much choreography and performance. The God I knew had always lived entirely outside stained glass windows. My God lives in tide pools along the Pacific coast, on dusty mountain trails, and in classrooms filled with teenagers who are slowly, awkwardly discovering who they are. My God lives in midnight conversations that make lonely people feel a fraction less alone. Nothing I ever experienced in the wild, natural world suggested that the Creator of the Universe spent much time worrying about whether my clothes zipped up the side or buttoned down the front.

But love asks things of us, and sometimes love asks you to wear uncomfortable clothes. When my close friend Jessica asked me to be a bridesmaid, there wasn’t a universe in which I would say no. I loved her, so I voluntarily stepped back into the aesthetic machine.

The dress fittings were exactly the sensory nightmare I expected. Endless yards of purple chiffon. Pins. Alterations. Heavy makeup that felt like drywall. Cans of hairspray. Manicures where I couldn’t use my hands for an hour. On the morning of the wedding, everyone kept stopping to tell me how beautiful I looked. I smiled. I thanked them. I stood perfectly still and posed for the camera, looking exactly like that miserable six-year-old on the front lawn.

But sitting in that church, surrounded by flickering beeswax candles and massive stained-glass windows, one thought settled very quietly over me: God knows.

It wasn’t a terrifying thought. I didn’t imagine God looking down from the ceiling disapproving of me. By then, I had argued myself out of that particular brand of guilt. It was something much quieter. I had the distinct, overwhelming feeling that if absolutely anyone in that room knew exactly who I was, it was God. Long before I had the vocabulary for it. Long before I had accepted it myself. Whatever else I misunderstood about the divine, I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe that God was surprised by me.

What God knew, sitting in that purple dress, was that I was pretending… that this carefully packaged, acceptable version of me was somehow more appropriate for a holy space than the actual human being sitting underneath the fabric. Not because the dress was feminine; but because  it was a costume requiring the actual me to completely vanish.

The absolute last dress I ever wore was for my brother’s wedding a few years later. My mother desperately wanted family pictures. She wanted everyone to look traditional and cohesive. She wanted the kind of visual harmony mothers sometimes spend an entire lifetime imagining. By then, I was old enough to know exactly who I was, and old enough to know how fundamentally wrong that ballet pink fabric felt against my skin. But I was still just young enough to believe that disappointing my family was infinitely worse than disappointing myself.

So I wore it. I smiled for the photographer. We took the pictures that now sit in silver frames on my moms bedside table. But somewhere inside myself I knew I’d hit my limit.  I headed outside after the ceremony, with unintentional cleavage, and asked the gaggle of male guests creating a celebratory cloud of smoke in their suits and ties if they had an extra cigar for me. Then I quietly made a promise to my own soul: Never again.

It sounds like such a small, trivial thing to draw a line in the sand over. A dress. People wear uncomfortable clothes to office jobs, interviews, and funerals every single day. But sometimes freedom arrives disguised as something completely ordinary. Liberation isn’t always a massive explosion or a public protest. Sometimes it looks like opening your closet on a random Tuesday morning, looking at the hangers, and realizing the rest of the world no longer gets a vote.

I have not worn a dress since. Not because dresses are inherently evil, but because they are wrong for me. Learning the difference between those two things entirely changed my life.

Over the years, I’ve stood inside plenty of churches dressed exactly as I am right now. Button-down. Converse sneakers. Short hair. The holy water has never boiled when I walk past. The plaster ceilings have never caved in. No priest has ever asked me to leave.

More importantly, I have never once felt rejected by the divine. Looking back, I can’t actually remember a single moment when I truly believed God was ever ashamed of me. I can, however, remember dozens of moments when I believed other people were.

For nearly half a lifetime, I mistook one voice for the other, only to realize they were never actually saying the same thing.