How Dressing As Poison Ivy For A Drag Kickball Game Changed My Life

A tale of the day I wore sky-high heels and scored a home run — and self-confidence.

Heels make you very tall.

I know that’s an obvious statement, but it’s not something I really thought about until I actually put on four-inch heels for my day as a drag queen. I’m only 5'5", so adding that extra height was quite the experience. I literally saw the world from a new height, and what’s more, the world saw me in a different way. Even though I looked like a baby giraffe just learning to walk, I had so much confidence — a confidence that’s lasted well beyond the gameday itself.

Playing kickball is rewarding for so many reasons. It’s a way to stay active, spend time with my friends and raise money for a good cause. I’ve been playing with my team, Muffin Tops (and Bottoms), for two seasons. Our league, Stonewall Sports, regularly raises money for charity. Every season, the league hosts a drag game followed by a show. All money raised at the show goes to charity. The day is the highlight of the season.

Players put so much time and effort into their outfits, and it shows. This year alone, we had a Wonder Woman, two Moulin Rouge showgirls, and a Sailor Moon. The commitment to being outlandish is impressive and frankly, a little intimidating.

The plan for me to do drag for the first time came about a few weeks earlier when I drunkenly said I would play in this season’s drag game. Last season, I had avoided, with great intensity, even the idea of playing in the game. I thought my struggle with crippling social anxiety meant that I could never do drag. Well, believe it or not, I was wrong.

First, some logistics about doing drag. It’s a lot of work. Like, a lot of fucking work, and I will freely admit that my drag was pretty half-assed compared to some other people who were playing that day. (Like my teammate Kevin, for instance, who looked like a delicate porcelain doll in a ravishing red dress with a brocade bodice.) It didn’t matter, though — there was still a lot of time (and money) that went into prepping. For the drag game, I decided to go as Poison Ivy from Batman. It involved me assembling an outfit of head-to-toe green, including tights, opera gloves, and a length of faux ivy that I wound around my body. I rocked an insane red wig and dyed my beard green, because there was no way I was shaving it off for one day. The heels, though, were the pièce de résistance: white patent platform Mary Janes, borrowed from my teammate, that were a size too large.

I recruited friends to help me out with every part. My teammates helped me pick out an outfit and my coworker Justine Figueroa did my makeup. I sent her a photo of Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy for reference and told her to just go for it. One of the first things I learned? Makeup is A LOT OF WORK. Like, way too much work. Dear all women: On behalf of the world, I apologize for all of this. Justine spent close to an hour making me up, and somehow managed to do a great job even though I flinched every time she got even remotely close to me.

The next thing I learned? Those white patent Mary Janes may have been a great look, but I won’t be adding them to my closet anytime soon. I walked a quarter-mile to the kickball field in them, worried the entire time that I was literally going to fall and bust up my (beautifully made-up) face. Heels are painful — they threw me off balance and I didn’t know how to walk in them. Teammates kept telling me to walk “heel, toe” but that didn’t seem to be getting through to me. Making it to the field was easily one of my proudest moments of the day.

I wasn’t foolish enough to believe I could actually play the game in the heels, although there were some players who wore them throughout. Those guys rocked it the entire time, so more power to them. I’ve never been a GREAT player, but I can get it done when it counts. This was one of those times. I got the winning run, leading my team to victory. It was the only time all season I crossed home plate. I did it wearing green tights and a red wig, so it felt like a successful day to me.

The most interesting thing I learned, though, was not that makeup makes my face feel frozen and immobilized (it does), or that heels are clearly torture devices inflicted upon women (they are). No, I honestly did learn a lot about myself by putting on a wig and heels for a day.

Confidence has never been something I would say I had a lot of. I’m not the tallest or the most attractive guy in the bar. I don’t have the ripped body that so many guys are looking for, and that can feel pretty bad.

But something about crossing the street in that red wig and those heels, surrounded by a group of people cheering me on, was intoxicating and filled me with a confidence I didn’t have before. Everyone at the game was so impressed by me and my teammate, who was dressed as the Harley Quinn to my Poison Ivy. People were looking at me, and not in a negative way. Wearing the heels meant people actually saw me, instead of looking over my head, like they normally do.

My teammate Kevin (he of the scarlet antique-doll getup) said of taking off the drag, “I feel invisible now.” That rang very true for me. Right after doing drag, I did go back to that feeling of people looking over or past me. I realized, however, that you can’t just put on confidence, like you do makeup or an extravagant wig. The confidence has to come before the drag. You have be comfortable in your own skin and have a healthy sense of humor to cross home plate dressed as a Batman villain. It sounds super cheesy, but I realized the confidence I felt while dressed in head-to-toe green, with ivy wrapped around me, didn’t have to end with the last inning. It was a confidence that I could — and should — bring to other areas of my life outside of kickball.

Since participating in the drag kickball game, I’ve started feeling that confidence in my everyday life. I walk a little taller, feel more comfortable talking to people and put myself out there just a bit more because of it. I’ve noticed an increase in my comfort level approaching guys in bars, and being approached! I feel better and stronger, and those feelings of confidence make me a happier person.

I have no plans to become a full-time drag queen anytime soon. But now, when I spy that red wig in my closet, it brings a smile to my face and I can’t help thinking, “What if…?”

This article originally appeared on Dose.com.