My outfit for Wednesday, October 20th was picked out weeks in advance. I had my purple J. Crew Sweater and violet imitation-Keds from Urban Outfitters laid out and ready to wear long before the 20th. My purple Urban Decay eyeliner was sharpened and ready to be put to good use. I hadn’t given this much thought to my outfit since, well, ever.

I wasn’t getting ready for a Pioneer High School pep rally or feeling the need to ignore the other six colors of the rainbow: I was dressed for “Wear Purple Day” or “Gay Spirit Day”. Held on Wednesday, October 20th, the day encouraged people to don purple clothing to honor gay pride and recent gay suicides that have rung an alarm across the country.

The media has been in an uproar over teens who have committed suicide, some as young as 13, because of anti-gay bullying. Ellen Degeneres and Anderson Cooper launched an anti-bullying campaign sponsoring the Trevor Project, a suicide hot line for youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. Dan Savage, a renowned advice columnist, launched a video series called “It Gets Better” in an attempt to invoke some hope for the future in teens who are in danger of heading down the same path as their aforementioned peers.

There were multiple Facebook events for Wear Purple Day, with hundreds of thousands of reported participants. The invites went out weeks before the actual event, fueling an excited buzz online.

At first, I joined in on the purple-stimulated anticipation. I invited all of my friends to the Facebook event and perused my closet for the perfect purple clothing. But as the day drew nearer, I grew more and more apprehensive: was this really it? Eight plus kids commit suicide and all we can do is coordinate our outfits? What change, if any, was this day going to bring?

Once October 20th rolled around, I did end up participating in the day of purple. I wore the sweater I had picked out and a purple ribbon in my hair, tied by a friend of mine.

But that’s just it: all we did was wear purple. We didn’t talk about the kids who died. We didn’t talk about what drove them to their deathbeds. We went to school with our purple on, and took it off when we got home. The next day, not much changed. We returned to our purpleless state, which turned out to be not much different from the day before. We were able to take our purple off. We threw it in the laundry basket or on our bedroom floor, left to be forgotten about until the next Pioneer High football game.

The kids October 20th was supposed to honor couldn’t take off their purple. They were purple. Their purple shirts were stitched into their skin. They lived with their purple every day. They were taunted and terrorized for their purple every day. They killed themselves because of the way others saw their purple.

Don’t get me wrong: raising awareness is always a good thing. But raising awareness for the sake of raising awareness is never effective. Wearing purple for one day was never going to change anything, because all it was was wearing purple. If we want to see real change, we need to act upon our purple. Hundreds of thousands of people responded to those Facebook events, and yet LGBTQ Americans aren’t guaranteed job security in most states. Saline Public Schools still can’t add sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression to their non-discrimination policy and legally protect their LGBTQ students. These policies foster an environment for the anti-gay bullying faced every day by teens like the ones who committed suicide. If we ever want these policies and environments to change, we are going to have to do a lot more than wear purple.