When I was five-years-old, I would beg my mother to let me wear my favorite dress-up princess dress to the grocery store, and as a seven-year-old, I would frequently show up in public with dandelions and clovers intentionally tangled in my hair. As a child, I cared about people’s opinion of me as much as cats care about where they spit up a hairball.

With this sense of negligence came a vastness of self-confidence in which I was never able to appreciate until now. I talked openly to people and behaved in a goofy manner without regret. Embarrassment was a word in my vocabulary but not an idea I understood.

From around the time I turned nine-years-old up until this past year, embarrassment was a tyrannical queen in my life, threatening me with the punishment of tigaly belly butterflies and shameful memories if I didn’t obey her strict rules. Suddenly, the idea of cracking a dumb yet mildly entertaining joke during a project presentation was mortifying, and the wearing of dandelion crowns became a practice that was reserved for at home and among close friends only. There were so many small, fun things that embarrassment forbade me from doing.

In my advancement into adolescence, I had acquired a sense of dignity.

Don’t get me wrong– dignity is very important to being a functional member of society. Dignity is what prevents us from showing up to a job interview in our birthday suites or having a tea party on top of an office building with five of our closest imaginary friends. Dignity is crucial to keeping up the illusion of sanity that we all know we depend on. However, issues arise when we end up developing a little too much dignity.

When you have too much dignity, you miss out on having a lot of fun. You miss out on performing ridiculous pep rally skits or going all out during spirit week. You end up on the sidelines watching other people have fun.

However, there are ways to offset your dignity and to get it to a level that can tolerate the soft blows to your ego that occur whenever you use a God-awful pun. The most effective method for taming your dignity (or at least the one that made me open) is wearing a tiara. It may sound peculiar, but hear me out, there is a lot to be gained from tiara-wearing.          

I discovered the power of the tiara last summer during my seventeenth birthday.

I had purchased a tiara off of Amazon a few weeks prior because I had some money I could burn through and felt like doing something nice for myself. On the day of my seventeenth birthday, I was left alone in the house. My parents were off at work, and a majority of my friends had summer jobs because unlike me, they were interested in a having a life.

While I was alone, I began wearing the tiara to make myself feel a little more special and was about to settle down with some Disney movies, when I noticed a disturbing lack of cookies in the house.

Determined to fix this predicament, I went to the grocery store and completely forgot I was wearing a tiara, until I noticed the cashier giving me a particular look. Instantly, I felt the queen of embarrassment herself calling me a moron as she cast her tingly belly butterflies in my stomach, but then I noticed something. I noticed a faint feeling of power and sophistication as I remembered that I was indeed wearing a tiara. I was wearing a tiara, and I felt like a queen. I was darn fabulous, and I did not care at all what that cashier thought of me.

The cashier was probably jealous of how cool I was.       

I realized on that day that embarrassment only has as much power as you allow it to. If you choose not to care and to embrace your own silliness, embarrassment has scarcely any value.

Since my seventeenth birthday, I have worn my tiara in public a few times, including once at school, just for the heck of it. Each time, I felt less and less embarrassed about it and began to feel proud of it. After having worn the tiara a few times and having gotten myself comfortable with being temporarily abnormal, I’ve had the confidence to do a lot more things I used to fear. I incorporate the use of corny puns during project presentations, and I feel more compelled to go all out during spirit week.

The real key to overcoming your own sense of dignity is to try to embarrass yourself a little bit to get comfortable with the feeling of being a little embarrassed. I feel wearing something simple, like a tiara, is good way of doing this. Not to mention, the embarrassment is padded down a bit by the sheer confidence that wearing a tiara provides you with, as these things are of course associated with royalty.

If tiaras are too feminine for your taste, a top hat should have the same effect of slightly embarrassing you, while giving you a sense of confident sophistication.