I’ve loved costumes, makeup, and glitter all my life. I reveled in dance competitions and musical theater as a kid. As I grew up, however, society told me that playing dress up was just for fun and that I had to figure out what I really wanted to do with myself.

As the pressure to become something built, my creative habits fell away. It wasn’t until adulthood, half way through a second university degree that I wasn’t sure I even wanted, that I realized society is wrong.

Besides Lady Gaga, there is one community in particular that opened my eyes to the empowerment and activism that comes with dressing up and getting glam­­– drag queens! The queens re-taught me what I’d already known as a performance kid: that taking control of your outer appearance can be a tool for communicating your inner identity.

What’s more empowering than telling the world who you really are, or what you really feel like, in a really fun way? Drag isn’t just about “looking pretty,” and if you’ve ever been to a drag show, that becomes apparent quickly. Looking pretty (or unique, or over the top) is just a means to an end. It’s what draws the eye in so you can show curious bystanders the amped-up attitude that your transformed look unleashes.

Drag allows people to take the parts they really like about themselves and accentuate them, creating a new character from those parts that isn’t hindered by the insecurities that society has rooted in the person underneath the persona. Of course, other personas can do this as well. We’ve all seen Stefani Germanotta rise to stardom through Lady Gaga as her medium to tell the world who she is and what she stands for, but (surprise!) Lady Gaga isn’t a drag queen.

What’s so unique about queens is that their very existence, while entertaining, is also activism. They’re doing the precise opposite of what society tells them to do as biological men. When Roy Haylock wakes up and decides to put on 10 pairs of eyelashes and call himself Bianca Del Rio, he does more than just make us laugh. Drag queens widen our conception of what it means to be; to be male, female, masculine, feminine, confident, attractive – any number of traits that society has told us are rigidly defined.

People like Bianca, however, tell us that these pieces of our identities don’t have to play by society’s rules. If breaking those rules makes you a happier and more confident person, or less worried, insecure, and stressed, then I firmly believe that it’s worth doing. Drag queens teach their fans that even people who aren’t what society constructs as “good” or “normal” can be admirable, strong, and talented. In my case, drag taught me to worry less about moving unhappily through the motions of turning myself into something, and more about enjoying the process of turning myself into someone, even if I turn a few confused heads along the way.