Everyone has issues that they chose not to confront; Whether it is to do with family, work or just the issues you find in yourself. These problems get pushed down to the bottom of the priority list, other things are just more “important”. They are either too painful; too much effort or something that you see as unsolvable.
I have a hat that, whether you believe it or not, changed my life. It made me stand up for what I believed in, showed me I didn’t actually have to be dictated to and put up with it. The short version of the story is that I bought a hat, a black hat; my first hat. The moment I bought this I knew that it was my new superpower.
My great-grandma used to wear a hat wherever she went. Granted, we both chose a very different style of hat. Yet she was known and remembered for her eccentric hats, and if one day that is one of the things that I am remembered for I will die happy. Some may say it is just a hat, but you are wrong. It has sentimental value, like a locket or an expensive vase. This hat showed me that if I was worried about what people said about me, then I had bigger problems than them. I worried that what they would say would be true. But I then realised that the people who say things to that extent are not the people I would want to be friends with anyway.
The hat gave me a new confidence. If I wanted to randomly visit Highgate in London then that is what I did. If I wanted to go and talk to the lovely lady in the bookshop about Enid Blyton then I would. Magic hat. It made me curious, and made it ok to be curious. I will travel to Kentish Town, Notting Hill and the BBC Centre, all to see if they are how I imagined they would be. 9 times out of 10 they are not at all what I imagined, but that makes it more of an adventure.
The hat inspires an independence that is usually hidden. It is still there, it just needs coaxing out sometimes. Some of my friends cannot understand how I can go into London on my own, to them it is weird that I am not with a large group of people all the time, but I am not like that. I have a beautiful group of friends; Sometimes I will be with them for two or three weeks straight and we will do everything, other times I won’t see them for months on end, but that works for us. If I am on my own, I don’t have to rush; I don’t have to be told which direction to walk in, and if I am bored I don’t have to worry that someone else doesn’t.
My hat is like an imaginary friend. It gives me support if I wear it, but also it is the reason that I want to be better. Once again, I know it is only a hat; an inanimate object but you all do the same. By buying that bag/watch/make-up you see your life getting a little bit better, you are made more confident when you take it out for the first time. The reason I bought this hat was because it was my first hat and it came along at a time of need, when I needed comfort from something inanimate and non-biased. People will always have an opinion on what is said but this hat taught me to face things head on and in my own time; I started dressing differently, to dress how I wanted to dress. I am not saying I dyed my hair pink and started ripping tights, I just became the right ‘Character’ which without the hat would have taken a lot longer to get to. Happy hat buying!
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