Yellow Hat

By Sarah Raman ‘20

I have a yellow hat. I wore it every day last winter, and when it’s too warm for beanies, I sleep with it like a teddy bear. The story of Yellow Hat begins in a French village in Bemidji, Minnesota.

 After freshman year, I decided that Spanish wasn’t enough-- I wanted to learn French, too. So, I searched the internet and found Concordia Language Villages, a camp that promised a year of French credit after spending a month immersed in a francophone “village” outside of Bemidji-- a perfect fit, I thought, for my impressively serious and scholarly 14-year-old self. I convinced my parents to sign me up, stressed about all the singing and dancing the website promised, and showed up on the first day ready to be overwhelmed, hopefully eat croissants, and throw my mind, body, and spirit into the pursuit of French. 

I did, in fact, learn French during that month. But as it turned out, French wasn’t the important part of French camp. The important part was my counselors and how they redefined the person I strive to become. 

Because of camp, I have multilingual, fiercely feminist role models who avidly compost and are passionate about everything from Camus to fungi and live all over the world and teach me about morphemes over lunch. But what puzzled my first-year-at-French-camp self was that these people, people who looked so much like who I wanted to be when I grew up, epitomized goofiness. They competed to see who could fill their cups fullest with water, they danced while people were watching, and every night they told us profanity-riddled bedtime stories about their teenage years before coming around to give us hugs. They wore fun pants and didn’t care about what we thought. One wore a yellow hat.

Those counselors rocked my world. It had never occurred to me that people I admired -- people who spent their summer joyfully leading workshops in French on gender equality and simulations of the French Revolution to kids who neither spoke French nor particularly cared about either topic -- could also care so deeply about doing things for the sake of having fun. By the end of camp, I realized that, while I admired their intellectual passion and drive to do the right thing, this sense of quirky, compassionate fun was why my counselors were so important to me.

So, when I got home, I bought a yellow hat to remind myself of who I wanted to become, and I wore it as a reminder of the counselors cheering me on. Putting on Yellow Hat every morning meant a promise that I would be brave, I would smile, and I wouldn’t let anyone look at me funny for wearing the hat. And in return, it was their promise back that the world held other yellow hat-wearers, even if I couldn’t find them in my school circles.

To my surprise, Yellow Hat was taken by my school community not as an expression of quirkiness or fun, but of my gender queerness. And because of that, I watched teachers deliberate every day between making me take off the hat to be in dress code and letting me express myself how I wanted. I liked confronting them with that question -- being the kid that made the adults think harder -- and nobody has ever made me take off the hat.

So I keep wearing Yellow Hat. It reminds me that, although I’m not always with people who appreciate quirky fun and big questions, I have a community supporting me who does. I can’t wait to reunite with them in Bemidji this summer for my second year on staff, especially now that I’m known for riding unicycles into lakes and inspiring kids to put on their own yellow hats. But in the meantime, even when it’s just me, putting on my own hat is enough to make wearing yellow hats okay.