I have mentioned before that I am not the most delicate of females.  I have always been, and most likely always will be, a tomboy.  It is me in the truest form of myself and how I feel most comfortable.  I am capable of donning a dress and feeling pretty but yesterday upped that ante by about 90 percent.

I went dress shopping for the dress that I will wear to walk down the aisle as maid of honor for my best friends’ wedding in September.  I began to sweat as soon as I walked through the door of the shop.  For those of you who have not experienced a bridal shop, it is a sea of chiffon, satin and lace and had I not controlled my breathing to calm myself I may have broken out in hives.

It is a daunting task to find a place to begin, especially when my fashion sense is based on jeans, hoodies and a baseball cap.  The first dress I picked was lovely.  I locked myself in the change room and, as soon as I tried the dress on, the metamorphosis had begun.

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The dresses kept coming but I kept looking back at that first dress.  All the other dresses paled in comparison and made me more self-conscious about wearing a dress than I already was.  I put the first dress back on again and I thought, for perhaps the first time, this dress could reflect my true personality without the baseball cap, the jeans and the hoodie.  This dress brought out a part of me that I have ignored.  For the first time in a long time, looking in a mirror, I felt beautiful.

Maybe it took finding the right dress to recognize that long-lost piece of myself.  Perhaps this was the a-ha moment Oprah always talks about.  And just perhaps a certain friend of mine may have been right when he said, “just find a little black dress, put it on and get over it”.

It’s not black and it has pockets but, I get it now.  Maybe there is that one dress that can be the sum of all of  your parts while making you feel better than you thought possible.  I think I found mine today.