It all started by a male friend painting his pinky for Budapest Pride. He left it on for a couple of more days and I thought it was cool. It seemed a smart way to express your support towards various sexual minorities. At the same time, I became also uncertain when I imagined that I would paint my nails. Nail polishing is feminine and I’m a male. What will people think? Am I ready for this? One night this topic came up while talking to friends and they gave me the support to start this journey.

So the other day I got my nail polished. I was scared. I was afraid of people’s reactions and judgements. I was afraid of people starting to handle me differently because of that. What if some people would not accept me this way? Also, do I really have to explain everyone why I did it? Can’t they just notice it silently, please?

Even though I felt that this was the thing I wanted to do, suddenly it just felt I was not completely ready for this. I wanted to challenge people, I wanted to challenge the general view of nail polishing being feminine, but what I did was actually challenging and stretching myself and facing all the fears related to my identity.

The first week was pretty damn hard. Everyone I met, I could not stop thinking whether they recognized it. I thought everyone’s facial expressions or gestures had hidden meaning now. Suddenly everyday things like going to the grocery store, eating at the regular hummus bar, ordering drinks at my favorite concert spot, or sometimes even just going home and meeting the neighbors became plain hard. People obviously did notice it, they stared at my fingers, opened their eyes wide, some smiled and some laughed behind my back. In people’s eyes, I became a feminine looking male, and hence I immediately faced all the pros and mostly cons of being part of this minority.

As it turned out, it was hard not to care about these judgements. In fact, I had learnt that my changed body image questioned my identity even for myself. For days, it felt my painted hands were not mine and someone else was holding the coffee mug for me. Sometimes I caught myself unconsciously putting my hands into my pockets to avoid people noticing it. It required work to accept myself with this new feature in the first place. Learning that my body still vastly defines my identity was a painful recognition. The chance of people considering me differently and might start guessing about my sexual orientation also shed lights on my insecurity.

After a month of journey with many ups and downs, I have settled all my concerns and fears by now. Today I’m a proud nail polish user. I found a great deep sea color (I just call it the caribbean sea!). I’m now confident telling anyone that I paint my nails because I simply like it. Since I’m vegan, as a side effect I even educated myself more about the use of animals in cosmetic products and got more conscious about it. I also got to face the challenges of waiting for your wet paint nails to dry when you’re already late from a morning meeting.

I’m a privileged person in many ways. I live in Europe. I work in tech. I’m white. I’m male. I establish romantic relationship with females hence people consider me straight. I’m also privileged because I have great friends from who I receive acceptance, and I go to a great workplace every day where diversity is the norm.

Pushing myself to such an uncomfortable situation helped me better understand my boundaries and build deeper empathy to people who went through this journey already — and not necessarily for the sake of experience but because of the way how they already felt natural. I had the luxury to go through all this by choice. It helped me understand that polishing my nails is a powerful tool to challenge the social norm, make people think about this and create space for conversations to potentially change the norm.

With sharing my story here, I encourage everyone to polish your nails to reflect on your own beliefs and fears, to inspire and challenge your friends, your kids, the people around you, and share the story of your self journey too.

Thank you Petra, Evi, Balazs and Jose for supporting me to start this journey and share my story with the world. ■