Treasured Beyond Measure
In a recent memoir writing workshop, I invited participants to recall memorable articles of clothing—shoes, hats, jewelry, or really anything they wore at any point in their lives. I encouraged everyone to capture as many items as their minds produced, jotting down each recollection on an index card. Then, with all the cards laid out in front of them, they were invited to sense which item called to be explored in more detail.
After guiding the group through an active imagination process intended to help excavate sensory and experiential associations with the item, I invited everyone to come back to the present moment and capture all the rich content in a bubble brainstorm. As constellations of experiences, sensations, and descriptions unfolded across their sheets of paper, I took the time to jot down a few of my own associations connected to a pair of white, straight-leg jeans adorned with a lush landscape of teal, fuchsia and saffron yellow blossoms.
Being a typical self-conscious 13-year-old, the printed floral pattern concealed lumps and bumps better than my usual black jeans ever could. I also felt a tad audacious wearing a pair of pants that could be considered “white” in color due to a particular feminine hygiene commercial at the time, suggesting women who wore white pants were “daring” and “bold.” It played on repeat, showing a tall, leggy goddess of a woman strutting down a busy metropolitan street, wearing a white silky tank top, white slacks and the white suit jacket removed but dangling over her shoulder like a half-cape. I’ll never forget how her 3-inch-high heels, also white, made her sleek blond hair flutter with each step or how the crowd of people she parted all turned their heads, awestruck at her unbelievable confidence.
This media-constructed message of bravery and femininity merged with my secret longing to wear bright colors and patterns, infusing these jeans with a kind of superpower in my mind. I felt bold and contemporary and not at all like me. My favorite musician at the time, Prince, also wore tight flowery pants, making me feel as if I, too, could be funky and hip and “One of the Beautiful Ones” he sang about.
Sometimes I matched my beloved jeans with pointy sun-colored flats; other times, I chose a deep purply-red pair. My aquamarine tank top worn under a billowy white, button-up blouse cinched tight at the waist with an oversized silver belt really made the blooms pop. Combining a deep magenta tank top with my smoky, off-the-shoulder cable knit and black lace-up boots accentuated the outlines on the smaller flowers. I walked differently wearing these jeans, flouncing around and feeling carefree as if I were just too cool for everyone else. When I wasn’t wearing them, I felt plain, dull, and unimaginative.
I wore variations of these outfits to the mall, to friends’ houses, and to school as many times as I could get away with. Though on days I didn’t, my brother or one of my friends pointed out the obvious, “Couldn’t find the flower pants, huh?” I didn’t care though. My flowered denims made me feel brilliant and sexy!
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In fact, I wore them so much, I remember how my breath caught when I first noticed the beginning of a hole in a thinned spot in the material between my thighs. I panicked but then decided it wasn’t that big a deal, pushing the thought of losing my treasured floral jeans completely out of my mind.
Of course, every time I wore them, the threads became increasingly frayed and a second and third opening soon appeared. At times, I found my fingers gently tracing the rips, marveling at the way my skin bubbled up out of the fabric. Sometimes, I tugged at the slits to widen them even more, taunting that part of me that couldn’t live without these pants. I was toying with the inevitable truth, daring this glorious piece of fashion to leave me.
Sometimes, I grabbed them from a pile of clothes on my bedroom floor and jammed a leg in before I remembered the holes. Other times, I just went ahead and jammed the other leg in, telling myself a lie: it wasn’t a problem, no one would notice.
Inevitably, on the days when my desire to wear them overpowered my worries about being humiliated, there was always that moment of realizing for the remainder of the school day or event, I’d have to keep my legs squeezed together, taking weird, halting steps when I walked. And unless my lower half was covered by a table or a jacket, I could never, ever let my legs relax apart while sitting down. I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed someone intently trying to keep the inside seams of their jeans from being visible, but it was probably as uncomfortable to watch as it was to attempt.
Why? Why had I put them on again? What game was I playing with myself? Maybe I was an idiot or my brain was broken? I had no answers.
In those precarious moments, I existed in dual states of awareness: one barely focused on the people and the conversations they were having and the other on the poofs of exposed skin touching each other between my legs. I must have looked like a crazy person: my head nodding whether the conversation warranted it or not and my eyes darting around the room surveilling other people’s eyes to make sure they hadn’t noticed anything.
Any cool factor these jeans ever afforded me was replaced with full-body sweats and freakish body movements. Every time I found myself caught in this flower jean-induced mind-meld of paranoia, I vowed to throw the horrid pants away the minute I got home.
Of course, I continued to wear them and only experienced freedom from their cruel dominion over my psyche when my mother/savior bravely tossed them into the trash while I was at school. The next time I went to put them on but couldn’t find them, I spun out. I threw huge fits and made terrible messes in the house looking for them. I skipped school the next day and even cancelled plans to go to the mall with friends that weekend.
My mother, exhausted from working too many doubles at the hospital that week, even offered to take me shopping to find a replacement pair, but I screamed back “I only want those jeans!” My brother laughed at me and told me how stupid I looked in them anyway and I should be grateful they were gone. This sparked more sobbing fits.
Over the next several weeks, I deeply lamented the loss, replaying the good times in my mind when the fully intact pair of flower jeans magically buoyed my spirit and made me feel like the coolest chick in school. How was I ever going to recover this sense of myself without my brilliant and beautiful wardrobe essential?
Thinking back to this torturous love affair with, well, a silly pair of jeans, I see the beginning of what became a pattern of over-identifying with material items and how this eventually extended to places I was too connected to, jobs I felt I couldn’t leave, and even lifeless, detrimental relationships I suffered in for far too long. This habit of glomming on to a thing, wringing and wearing it out, and then desperately holding on to any imagined sense of meaning and purpose became a core learning loop in the journey of my life. I have returned many times to witness and analyze this process, gaining a bit more awareness with each rotation inward.
Of course, one of the best ways to learn a thing entails teaching it to someone else, and as a college instructor, part of my learning process entailed building my composition courses on the theme of media literacy, the practice of applying a critical lens to media messages. I often echoed my own growing insight in lectures, telling my students the search for identity and meaning is a natural part of everyone’s development process, but the deep attachments we may develop to material items are not by accident. I consistently remind them we’re all susceptible to the persuasive powers of a multi-billion-dollar industry dedicated to dissecting our lives with psychological profiles and mining our behavior via online data to build elaborate and utterly beguiling brand identities.
Every semester, I introduce the mantra: “If others know us better than we know ourselves, we run the risk of being confined to their ideas and definitions.” And since their goal is to generate profits, their sole focus is to make us believe the items we buy define us and give us worth. A car is not just a vehicle we operate; it’s touted as “strength” or “prestige.” A perfume is not just a scent; it’s one’s “mojo” or “sensuality.” My pants masqueraded in my world as “feminine empowerment.”
Throw into the mix the way marketers leverage our struggle to fit into society’s narrow definitions of femininity and masculinity, our intuitive conflicts with media misrepresentations of race, age, class, ability, etc. (with the general lack of representation of these groups symbolically reinforcing the concept of “other”), and the over-sexualization of well, everything, and our search for identity in this advertising-saturated climate feels more like a losing battle on a psychological minefield.
Inevitably a student will blurt out the obvious, “But no one is forced to buy what they’re selling.” And yes, we are always free to just not make the purchase—one of the more effective ways to confirm our own beliefs, especially collectively. But when there is even a hint of instability or disconnect in our early lives and something as powerful and nebulous (and ad-generated) as “culture” repeatedly imbues these items with ineffable concepts like “love” and “happiness,” it’s nearly impossible to say no and so much easier to slip on ready-made identities of “popular” or “cool” in the form of a shirt or pair of shoes to feel a sense of connection or importance.
Every semester, at least a quarter of my students write essays about the lengths they will go to purchase Nike apparel because they are 100% certain they perform better in their respective sports when they are wearing the brand. Imagine, your sense of your own physical abilities being dictated by four letters or a swoosh printed onto an article of clothing? But that’s the result of repetition, brand recognition, and most disturbingly neuromarketing—where the appeals are intentionally crafted to bypass the conscious, logical mind and speak directly to the less rational, more impulsive unconscious mind. And studies show most people never even realize how their consumption habits are being formed by these covert methods.
Of course, if we remain unaware and/or willingly participate in this toxic dynamic long enough, supplanting our own sense of self with advertising-generated identities, our emotional and relational lives suffer, too. And when we recognize how we are conditioned to be consumers from infancy (just ask a five-year old like this father did), we know it is a revolutionary act to determine our own worth and define our own truths.
And yes, in this marketing machine of a modern world, this is so much easier said than done. This is why I still include these lectures in my classes—because I still need to hear them, too. Along with my students, I aspire to remain aware of the advertising vortex and continue asking myself, “Is this me or is this someone else’s idea of me?” and more importantly, “Who and how do I choose to be?”