In my early years of life, I wore whatever my mom wanted me to wear: a combination of my hand-me-downs and store-bought clothes of every color of the rainbow.

As I got older and had the opportunity to choose how I wanted to dress, I started opting for darker and darker clothing. I stuck to clothes in shades of black, gray, and maroon.

And I had a particular thing against the color pink.

It’s strange, isn’t it? Young girls are born to a world that hands them pink room decor, pink toys, pink clothes.

Then we get older and we are conditioned to hate the color pink.

How could we not be? Every movie and TV show that we watched growing up presented us with mean girls hiding their cold gaze behind pink sunglasses, driving into the school parking lot in their pink convertibles, wearing layers of pink lip gloss, and stepping out in their pink outfits.

We weren’t supposed to want to be like them.

The color pink became associated with being a dumb, vain, mean, sleazy, weak, girly drama queen, and that’s the last thing you wanted to be.

We were supposed to want to be like whatever protagonist was in the film. The girl who is cool. The girl who is beautiful without even trying. The girl who is “not like the other girls.”

I spent so much of my life trying to be that girl, trying to be interested in things that didn’t make me seem girly.

Little 13-year-old me had this twisted idea that that was what feminism was. That there wasn’t room for femininity in it.

So I hid my love for pop music and rom-coms, I never wore make-up, and I hated the color pink.

The older I got, however, the more that began to change.

After years of sticking to dark clothes, dark shoes, dark decor, dark everything, I want to live life in glorious technicolor, which especially includes the color pink.

I’ve realized, largely thanks to the internet, that I can like the color pink while still being intelligent and strong and powerful and anything I want to be.

The color pink is cute and comforting and happy, and if everything I own from here on out ends up being pink and people think it’s too “girly,” so be it!

I mean, colors shouldn’t even have genders attached to them in the first place, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Kyara Morales-Rodriguez is a junior English major. She can be reached at 581-2812 or knmoralesrodriguez@eiu.edu.