> CD #85: Life in looks

I was recently reading this New Yorker article about how some people view their lives as one continuous narrative while others have a more disjointed experience. How can you tell which type of person you are?

Try to remember life as you lived it years ago, on a typical day in the fall. Back then, you cared deeply about certain things (a girlfriend? Depeche Mode?) but were oblivious of others (your political commitments? your children?). Certain key events—college? war? marriage? Alcoholics Anonymous?—hadn’t yet occurred. Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character?

If you have the former feelings, you’re probably a continuer; if the latter, you’re probably a divider. You might prefer being one to the other, but find it hard to shift your perspective. In the poem “The Rainbow,” William Wordsworth wrote that “the Child is Father of the Man,” and this motto is often quoted as truth. But he couched the idea as an aspiration—“And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety”—as if to say that, though it would be nice if our childhoods and adulthoods were connected like the ends of a rainbow, the connection could be an illusion that depends on where we stand.

I’m not sure where I stand, exactly. Often, I feel I’m essentially the same person I was at age eight (nerdy, bookish, people-pleaser), but it has also felt like I’ve lived many different lives—some with very distinct beginnings and endings.

And it’s just as confusing when I think about life through the lens of my fashion choices. There are things I’ve loved consistently since I was a kid, like cardigans and pale pink, but then there is all the cringeworthy stuff I once thought was the epitome of good taste, including bucket hats and almost every single pair of jeans I wore from 2002–2012. Also this t-shirt, lol.

Why did I think having a font on my t-shirt was cool? Why did I wear such tight clothes? And what was the deal with American Apparel? The early aughts are threatening to come back and I am scared.

Makes me thankful my unfortunate style choices will never be documented à la Vogue’s Life in Looks. (Note: I’ve actually only watched one video from this series in its entirety—Victoria Beckham’s, because Posh Spice forever.)

The article is ultimately frustrating because, after introducing the dichotomy and teasing the differences out over several pages, it seems to conclude that it doesn’t really matter how you view your life. In the end, “sticking with any single account of your mutability may be limiting,” and there is value in considering the opposite perspective, to “see yourself as either more continuous or less continuous than you’d assumed.”

Fair, I guess, but also kind of a letdown. I wanted to know which way was better!

Alas, all the New Yorker could give me was this wonderfully poetic line: “Lives are long, and hard to see.” That is, I guess, unless Vogue prints out your life in looks.

:) Teresa

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