To do this, I have to gaze back into my earliest years (cue the hazy fog).
Obviously, growing up as a girl, 'pink' was saturated into my wardrobe, toys, room decor, birthday cards and decorations, hair accessories, and not surprisingly...that of the majority of my same sex playmates.
We did not choose it. It seemed, in fact, to have chosen us. I did not pay it much mind, and because of that, I never questioned it.
That is, until the birth of my younger sister. She was born less than a week before my sixth birthday...completely eclipsing the event in every way. I was thrilled. I thought she was an early gift for me...a living doll. Unlike the small army of dolls I had who each could perform some task: one that cried, one that walked, one that wet it's diapers...this one would do it all!
Of course, her nursery was pink.
That was where the similarities ended. Where I was fair haired, pale with blue eyes....she was dark of hair with a warm french Canadian complexion and huge brown eyes. I was quiet and reserved....shy and obedient. She was curious and willful...outspoken and strong.
As a toddler, she either rejected my feminine hand me down apparel or my parents realized that blush coloured dresses and ribbons were not conducive to playing with trucks in the dirt. She did not play Barbies with me nor fall into the familiar category of younger siblings who took them and snipped off their hair or drew on their faces with marker. She paid them no mind. Instead she turned her attention on the neighbor's child for a near scalping that even though forced to apologize for....still looked most proud of her work.
Over time I began to observe her from a safe distance. We shared vaguely similar features from our same parents. Same household.
We were both girls.
That was when it hit me. She was no less feminine in her overalls and tangled wavy curls than I was in my fushcia sweater and hair ribbon. She did not seem at all masculine sitting among the little boys in the sandbox. Her movements, the way in which she approached play, her diminutive fingers and turn of her wrist even entrenched in dirt pushing the same toy bulldozers through the silt was definitively that of a girl.
It was then that 'pink' began to bother me.
I looked around my room. It was as if someone had coated it in a healthy dose of pepto bismol. It felt suddenly suffocating. As far back as I could remember it was the colour of my life. Many good memories attached to it, I could not easily reject it....but I tried.
Every year, with our birthdays so close together and family Christmas celebrations we shared in simultaneously opening presents. Ones that brought us, as sisters, neigh identical gifts save the age difference. It may have been the same ritual from the beginning, but suddenly I was aware that my sister's gifts of clothing arrived in soft blues, whites and greens.....mine...in pink.
Not wanting to be ungrateful, I began to devise a plan to rid myself of this rosy identity. I would begin months before any gift bearing with specific requests for items in any and every colour but pink. To no avail.
When I was thirteen, I took my first part time job after school and on weekends at an ice cream parlour famous for it's 31wonderful flavours. Of course....the uniform was pink. I sucked it up for my $3.15 per hour because I knew that every two weeks, liberation would come in the form of a cheque. A cheque I cashed and promptly spent on clothing. Mostly black.
Black became my new armour. It seemed to be the antithesis of pink. Nothing girly or frivolous about it. My parents had a mild reaction to it, thinking it a bit "harsh"...but I continued to swath myself in it. There are those who regard fashion as superficial. there is, of course an element of that to it. However, since most of us do not live in nudist colonies...it is our "outward show", our calling card, a presentation and representation of our tastes and personalities. It is also a benchmark moment in our lives when we not only begin to reject what our parents dress us in, but adopt our own identity and make conscious choices about how we will be seen to the rest of the world. Where we decide who we are, how we want to be perceived and where we shake off blindly accepting what others believe we are or want us to be. Our choice.
Mine was black. I can honestly say there was a palpable difference in how people related to me dressed in dark colours. I was taken more seriously on some level. It is difficult to describe unless you have experienced it firsthand.
Yet, every Christmas, my sister and I would unwrap our Christmas eve 'gift' ( a pair of pajamas each that we were told to promptly put on and go to bed)...mine...always pink. As we got older, my sister actually began to find it amusing and would laugh and taunt me a bit with it. One year in my early teens, I asked my relatives at our hosted holiday feast what I thought at the time was a most Barbara Walters-esque question "If I was a colour....what colour would I be?"...hoping to find that general perception would deem me something more neutral. I was gutted. My Mother, Aunt, Sister, Uncle....all of them said "pink". Traitors. Even my black wardrobe had betrayed me. Only my Father answered "Brown"...which to this day I still am slightly unsure of it's meaning as both an offering to appease and represent me, in general.
I began to think my 'pink' curse was following me through life. Like a very pretty, but deadly pink tornado.
So....I ignored it.
Through my late teens and twenties I avoided it. Never purchased anything tinted with it. Almost as in a class war, I turned my nose up at it and paid it no regard. I understood it was all around me...I just regarded it as beneath me.
In recent years, an odd thing happened. Pink began to reveal itself to me through photography, art, fashion, decor in odd and surprising ways. When I began to 'see' it once again, instead of looking past it...it actually appealed to me. It was comforting. There is an actual psychology associated with the colour as it has shown to have a calming affect...tranquilizing.
So...I have slowly adopted it. It no longer offends or defines me. It still feels quite blatantly feminine, but I have realized that so do I. It is a 'part' of who I am...not all of who I am.
In the end...it is just a colour. One of many.
I cannot pretend that as such, it has not been a very large metaphor in my life. No one can deny it has certain and specific immediate connotations in general perception. It does.
For me....it represents a full circle journey on the path to figuring out who I am on the inside...regardless of anything else. Rejecting social norms, then accepting them and making them your own after much life experience.
Pink.
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