Who is That Woman?
Reconciling my memories with the receipts
At my office holiday luncheon in December, we played a game called Who Am I? We were instructed to write fun, little-known facts about ourselves on squares of purple paper and then fold them up and place them in a cookie tin. Then we took turns plucking a clue and reading it aloud so that our officemates could guess which one of us wrote it. At the outset, our group could be divided into two unequal camps. Those who started writing immediately and the rest of us, myself included, who twiddled their pens with a blank stare. We were stumped, though for different reasons.
In between bites of the largest slice of chocolate cake I’ve ever seen, one of us said, “I am an open book, how can I possibly come up with a fun fact about me that they don’t already know?” My response was more like, “My hidden depths are so vast, how can I possibly curate them for display when I am under time pressure and already halfway through a French 75 spritzer?”
I had a really hard time figuring out how much I wanted to share with my officemates. I am not a completely locked box these days. I don’t have as many walls up as I did at the beginning of my career when I was 30 but often mistaken for an undergrad even though my wardrobe consisted almost entirely of the holy trinity of J. Crew, Banana Republic, and Ann Taylor. I needed to establish myself professionally in a space where my colleagues were explicitly socialized not to see me, a young Black woman as their peer. The last thing I needed was for them to know that Gossip Girl was appointment viewing for me when I got home from work. Over time, I realized that my job was dependent on relationship-building, so I learned how to let my guard down.
Fast forward to the present and people at work have a much greater sense of my general vibe, even if they don’t know the details. Deciding what new tidbits I was going to give them was a challenge. I settled on telling them about my go-to karaoke song and how many tarot decks I own (two). No one guessed on the first, second, or third try that I am an amateur witch who likes to sing about leaving behind a carefully constructed public image.
That whole exercise got me thinking about self-curation and the question of how the stories we tell about ourselves change depending on the audience. Especially since I was in the middle of reading Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.
The story focuses on Lara, who is living in a quarantine bubble on her family cherry farm with her twenty-something daughters. The girls are home to help with the harvest in the absence of seasonal workers who cannot travel during the pandemic. As they pulled fruit from the trees, they asked their mother to tell them the story of when she dated a soon-to-be-famous movie star called Duke while the two of them were acting together in a summer stock production of Our Town. The girls grew up watching a film starring Duke and built up a whole mythology around what their relationship must have been like and why their mom made the choices that she did.
In telling this story, Lara had to balance sharing enough to satisfy their curiosity, shield them from information that might cause them harm, and avoid topics that she was not ready to speak about. Her goal was to give them a little bit of what they wanted (the truth) and a little bit of what they needed (guidance in deciding what kind of lives they wanted to live).
My kids have recently asked my husband and me about how we got engaged and how long we were married before they were born. They have not asked about who we were before we got together. Maybe they take for granted that I never really dated anyone else because it is more or less true. If they had asked, I probably would have told them that not only was I a late bloomer, but that I never even came close to having an ex as an anecdote. But then, I went back and looked at my high school old journals and photo albums. Guess who is an unreliable narrator???
It’s That Woman.
A while back I asked Where was my Lloyd Dobler? It turns out he was there all along, I was just too full of self-doubt to notice. Somehow I had convinced myself that I went through my entire teen years without getting the kind of romantic attention that I craved. This is false! I have proof! There he is!
I met José at a residential summer research program for high school students from underrepresented backgrounds interested in STEM. In between SAT prep workshops and running experiments in the lab, we played beach volleyball and ate popsicles in the dining hall. As a type-A rule-follower, it wasn’t until the last night of the five-week program that I stayed out of my dorm room past curfew. We talked for hours (an introvert milestone for me). I credit my fifteen-year-old self for opening up to him. I was braver than I remembered.
On the final day, I was so charmed when he kissed me on the cheek (another milestone!) as his mother hovered smilingly a few feet behind him. In the weeks after the program ended and our junior year of high school began, we sent each other handwritten letters to catch up. One of his letters contained an invitation to a party at his house at the end of summer. Even though I was excited about the chance to see him again, I had to decline. That’s right. I didn’t go because it conflicted with… MARCHING BAND CAMP.
Was my sense of duty to my fellow bandmates so strong that it didn’t occur to me to take a day off and follow my heart? Or was it because I didn’t think my parents would let me go and so I took it off the table to avoid the potential disappointment of them shooting down the idea? Maybe I was afraid that it wouldn’t work out, so I took myself out of the situation as a protection against rejection. Which is more embarrassing? In the end, it didn’t matter. The letters stopped, and I never saw him again.
Looking back at these artifacts is a way of playing a game of Who Am I with myself. If I hadn’t kept those journals and pictures, I never would have remembered this story. I wonder if my past self erased all traces of this story to prevent my future self from cringing so hard. I am glad all of the teenage ephemera, and the stories buried by my subconscious didn’t end up in the landfill. The cringe-worthy choices that I made are probably the ones my kids would most benefit from hearing about.
All the rest…
Who Wore it Best - Jersey Puffer Edition
First up we have Taylor Swift, bringing strong “No Mom (eye roll) I don’t have time for breakfast I have to get to school early to decorate his locker for game day!!!” energy with this custom jacket. Except for the gloves, she kept the rest of her outfit neutral to make sure the jacket popped. Should she have gone for more of an orange-red lip?
Next up is Spike Lee, making me think he might be the one behind the dailybrunson fan account. Even with the hat, the glasses, and the kicks, the puffer still stands out. No neutral backdrop for Spike.
Will jersey puffers trickle down to suburban sports moms? Rocking your kid’s jersey as bespoke outerwear could become the new Stanley Tumbler. Get on that, influencers!
A last minute puffer jersey vest from Simone Biles! Three is a trend! What do we think?
https://www.instagram.com/p/C2TMDmfrtl-/?igsh=MWduc3VzeXdiaWNncA==