The Greater Significance of Wearing Hats Backwards

I have a somewhat liking for hats. Let’s be real for a minute, it’s a toxic obsession. Hanging on a 24 slot rack above my bed, I have a every peg filled with baseball caps, truckers, and snapbacks, and then wedged between each peg, you guessed it—there are more hats. Bordering the ceiling of my room, there’s a few more, and by a few, I mean upwards of 20. It’s a slight problem you could say.

Some I don’t really wear, others, I rarely take off, but I love them all for some intrinsic symbolic reason that I don’t really have justification for. Some are really clean and what I would refer to as my ‘dressy’ hats, and others are sweat stained, sun faded, de-threaded, and stripped of their former glory. These ones as hideous as they may seem are probably my favorite because of the mountain peaks they’ve seen, the sand they’ve been left in, the experiences they’ve been worn through, and the stories that they have accompanied me on.

If you imagine me in your head, there’s a really high chance that you’ve attached a cap to my face as if it was a part of me.

As I’ve now realized though, your depiction or my hats orientation of my skull is entirely dependent on when you met me. If you knew me when I was younger, you’d find me reppin’ a Kenworth Trucking cap faced forward with the bill bent practically in half—to which in photos I see myself in, are laughable. However if you’ve known me in the last three or so years, you know I’m a strict flatbill type of guy with the bill faced to the back.

It was always an interest of mine to determine when this transition really happened. This shift really just happened, but I couldn’t tell you exactly when or why. Why would an ever so simple 180 degree rotation of how I place my headwear be such a dramatic phase change in my life?

This question was something that kept me up thinking. Wide awake at night trying to determine a relevant answer for a seemingly irrelevant question. It’s along the same lines of essential questions like ‘How do Mermaids breathe?’

I can think of when I played T-ball, and baseball, and we were expected to wear our hats forward to keep the sun out of our faces to catch pop-flies. But now as a fairly recreational photographer, when the bill is forward, I find it snagging on my DSLR camera flash.

As a young boy it was imbedded in me that wearing your hat backwards meant you were a part of a gang, but much older me realizes that gang initiation is typically just a little bit more intense than wearing a Yankees cap in reverse. I mean if it was that simple, you’d be in the minority if you weren’t a gangster.

More practically, wearing your hat forward functions better for SPF protection on your face, but wearing it backwards covers your neck and eliminates the neck tan line.

There’s advantages and disadvantages to both directions, but as I think in a more broad lens, how we orient our hats has something more prominently distinct about our identities as a whole than we’d ever care to admit.

We wear hats to hide something.

There are literally no other reasons.

We might be hiding our eyes from radiant sun beams, we might be hiding a patch of thinning hair, or we might be hiding a false perception of who we actually are.

For me personally, wearing hats allows me to hide facial expressions, therefore blocking my emotions, making it more difficult for others to read me. When wearing my caps with the bills faced backwards, I’m able to cover my forehead and shield features that give away how I really feel.

I do this for a couple reasons. The first being because I don’t want to unintentionally hurt others by sending a wrong message, without ever even opening my mouth. This is something I find myself guilty of constantly. This yields itself from our humanistic dependence on non-verbal communication, and the fact that we can say so much more, by saying nothing at all. But this lack of direction can be excruciatingly damaging to our connections with others.

Mainly though, I direly fear sharing real emotions with those in my life. Whether it’s a total stranger, or my best friend, the difficulty of revealing what and how I really feel remains the same. Maybe it’s the social expectations we have towards men, maybe it’s the fear or emotionally investing in those who don’t truly value connections. Either way, it has become so neglected, that when there’s a genuine time when processing grief, concern, anger, and uncertainty, our emotional identities are so confused, that we don’t know how to properly handle ourselves. Do we cry, scream, fight, and isolate ourselves? We’ve been discouraged from feeling to the point that we no longer know how to feel.

Where this becomes dangerous is where these two defining variables collide.

When we don’t know how to process what we feel, we find ourselves hurting other people in an effort to regulate some kind of internal normalcy. This confounds itself repetitively to the point in which entire group systems can crumble from the ground up.

For me, hiding my emotions is a defense. Except over time, the protection that I it had once provided me, has now become self-inflicting. I constantly find myself in situations apologizing for the way I’ve acted, when I wasn’t emotionally prepared to handle a personal situation. I often say things out of line solely because I was trying to normalize the interactions. This often leaves a billowing cloud that hovers over me, preventing me even more from opening up.

Is all hope for healing gone?

Is this how it ends?

Is there any real way we get over this?

This unfortunately is no twelve step program, which can be changed in a week, but rather a strenuous process that grows with you.

It starts with being real with yourself, and acknowledging if you are tampering your emotional well being in order to avoid human connection. Recognizing if you are processing hurt in a method that only temporarily negates what you feel, that you will never find true healing.

Then asking yourself if your desire to mute your emotional expression, has silenced genuine communication with those who you welcome into your life.

This opens the door for a self assessment determining if you are hiding from something and putting up both physical and symbolic covers to avoid truth being released.

Here’s the deal.

We are all humans.

We all experience pain, hurt, guilt and struggle. We were meant to feel. We were meant to be able to process our emotions in healthy ways. We were never meant to void our identities in an attempt to conceal our pain and scars.

As for me, I will continue to wear my hats backwards so that I can continue to hide much of my emotional expression.

But the imagery continues.

When my hat is backwards, the bill can no longer shadow my face...

-Nick