Editor’s note: hi, it’s me, I’m the editor. The content of this series is adapted from the Memoir That Never Was, which I wrote last year. The themes centered on identity-making and my relationship with secondhand stuff), but in writing it, I ended up synthesizing ideas that have been pivotal to my growth as a person since turning 40. Although I decided to shelve my Memoir That Never Was indefinitely, I decided that there are parts of it I would like to share here on the blog. It will get pretty personal/vulnerable at times, but I think the community we’ve created here is a wonderful (and safe) space, and I hope that these posts will inspire reflection and conversation. Cheers!
Years of walking through thrift stores, looking at things people have discarded or left behind has taught me that beauty can be found in unexpected places, and that I should look for it wherever I go. And once I started looking, I did begin to see it – everywhere I went. Our society has an obstinate tunnel vision about what beauty looks like. But the human desire for beauty is much greater than that, and it imbues everything we make and touch and use. There is beauty in a well-loved wool sweater, in a handmade quilt, in a porcelain cup. There is beauty in the way a woman wears that sweater, in how she displays that quilt, in how she pours tea into that cup and drinks it. Being able to see that beauty – in what society calls mundane, especially – is a wellspring of gratitude, amazement, and wonder. You know the saying, “life is beautiful”? Its simplicity seems almost ridiculous once you grasp the full truth of it; once you feel the truth of it in your bones. Society gives us little room to grasp it. It’s like being in the most extraordinary museum ever built, and being pushed and jostled along at breakneck speed by a guide who gestures vaguely in every direction, “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, let’s keep moving, so beautiful, marvelous, extraordinary, this way, please keep up”. You know you’re in the vicinity of beautiful things because someone is telling you that you are, but you see practically nothing, and have no time to decide how you feel about any of it.
Pause. Breathe.
There are no guides at the thrift store. You have to look, and stop, and look again. Touch things, turn them over, really have a close look. What do they look like? How do they feel in your hands? What do they remind you of? How do they make you feel? You might start to wonder. Who made this? Who used this? Do I have a place in the story of this object? Does it have a place in mine?
I’m not gonna lie. I’ve bought a lot of things in thrift stores over the years. I’m a Taurus Rising, I like pretty things, ok? At least, that’s what I told myself for a long time: I just like beautiful things. Call me materialistic, I don’t care. Guilty as charged. I am the person that picks a material thing over an experience most of the time.
(As a sidenote, it’s funny to me how society says we should value experiences more than material things, while constantly whispering in our ears “but do you have enough stuff yet?” If society really wanted us to value experiences more than things, it would stop overproducing things. But what society actually wants is to sell us something, anything, experiences or things, it doesn’t matter – preferably both.)
Recently, I began to reevaluate this self-belief and I eventually arrived at the conclusion that, for me, experience and object are inextricably linked. When I buy a book, I’m not simply buying an object. I am buying the experience of reading it – for the first time, and a second and a third – and losing myself in a new world or learning something about the one I’m living in. I am buying the experience of owning my own library and being surrounded by books at home – a feeling I find deeply soothing. The experiential value of clothing is pretty obvious, of course. But even the objects I buy simply for display are part of various experiences: the experience of finding the object (I have so many good thrifting stories!), the experience of looking at it on a shelf at home and enjoying its beauty in harmony with its surroundings, the experience of creating an indelible record of the person I am in that moment. If you look around my house, at the objects I have accumulated – and I mean, really pause and look, not simply allow your eyes to glide over like you’re watching Uncle Frank’s 2016 holiday pictures from Puerta Vallarta again for the 20th time – you can “read” my story: what I like, what I value, what I dream. I was recently visiting the house of an old friend I hadn’t seen in a few years, and we spent most of the time going around her house looking at various objects that she had added since my last visit. She wasn’t “showing off” her material possessions to me; we were catching up on her life. Each object had a story, which connected to other stories, which connected to others, and so on. I got to hear about her trips, her new hobbies, her plans for the future. All of that was possible because she’s a person who sees the beauty in objects, who values them, who allows them to have meaning. Buying something doesn’t make it meaningful; value isn’t determined by cost. Beauty, value, meaning exist in a relationship between the person and the object.
My recent reevaluation of my relationship with material things led me to another realization as well. For me, the value of an object is not just a question of beauty or experience: I love things that look like they have history. It’s not just an Old Money thing. At, least, I don’t think it is. W. David Marx writes that “all status symbols require alibis – reasons for adoption other than status seeking.”[1] I don’t think of myself as someone who needs alibis, but one should never underestimate one’s capacity for self-deception. So, ok: maybe enjoying nice things that are a bit shabby – that look lived in, well-loved – is, in part, a question of showing off my cultural capital, acquired not by birth but by “absorbing the tastes … and preferences of high-status people”[2] through my thrifting habit. I don’t love this take, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not true. Still, several things can be true at the same time, and I do think my taste in interior design is more than Old Money cosplay. I’ve never wanted a house that looks like an expensive showroom. I want a house that reminds me of my grandparents’ house, with its books and its rugs, its knickknacks and its piano, its opera vinyl records and its porcelain-tiled fireplace – all of them belonging to an era that had vanished long before I was born. I want a house that evokes that same sense of wonder and happiness I felt as a child in a space that filled my imagination like a combination of museum, time machine, and magical refuge. I want, most of all, a house that looks like a layer cake, bringing together the stories of many generations.
And here we have arrived at the crux of the matter. Because, of course, as an immigrant in a new country, I have no material history from which to build my layer cake. The vast majority of my family’s belongings had to be left behind when we moved to the West; we couldn’t take much with us, and what we took were mostly functional things. Most of my grandparents’ possessions are gone too; for various reasons, there was no opportunity to save more than a few sentimental items before their respective houses were sold. I have my memories of those houses – islands slipping a little farther into an ocean of oblivion with each passing year – and not much else to help me piece together my families’ stories. When my dad is gone, I will lose the last person who is also a keeper of those stories. It is an incredibly lonely thought – hard to bear now, harder to bear later, I’m sure. It’s the same for my husband, who left a war-torn country with pretty much the clothes on his back. Between us, we have precious little in the way of what you might call heirlooms. I don’t have my grandmother’s hand-embroidered tablecloths; he doesn’t have his grandpa’s watch. All we can do is create our own heirlooms.
It might sound silly, in this context, to say that I buy things because they have history. Why does it matter if they do, if it’s not my own family’s history? Can someone else’s grandma’s handmade quilt replace my grandmother’s tablecloths? In a literal sense, of course not. But I like to think of it in a different way. My memories, my family stories, are an inextricable part of my relationship with the world around me. When I look at an object and find it beautiful, it is not a judgment made in a vacuum; it’s a judgment that speaks, among other things, of my memories. I’m not buying a Japanese vase because I think my mom would have loved it; yet, my taste was shaped, in small imperceptible ways, by who my mom was, and her mother before her, and her mother before that. And so, even though you won’t see their possessions when you look around my house, I like to think that you can still catch glimpses of them here and there. There are glimpses of my husband’s ancestors too. There are glimpses of the people we are, of course, and the people our children are becoming. It feels a little less lonely to think about it that way.
Thrifting brought a sense of wonder back into my life by helping me notice the beauty in everyday objects. I think it can do the same for others, which is why I am always excited to hear about people giving it a try for the first time. It also inspired me to start paying attention to how I engaged with the objects in my life. To acknowledge a relationship. That, to me, is the core of mindfulness. I used to think that mindfulness required meditation, and meditation required somehow dumping out the contents of one’s mind and focusing on a single thing like breathing or a mantra — a practice as fundamentally incompatible with the way my brain works as riding a bicycle is to a fish. I was wrong. There are many paths to mindfulness, and also many facets to it – some more accessible than others. I’ve always lived inside my own head, so inward-facing mindfulness came relatively easily once I figured out how to put myself into a flow state (or, as I like to call it, meditation for people who can’t meditate). Outward-facing mindfulness is different; it’s not like plugging in an antenna and tuning in to the right station, but more like putting on a pair of glasses and seeing what we couldn’t see before: that we live in relation to the physical world, not wholly separate like starships moving through space. Mindfulness requires us to acknowledge that we exist as part of a relationship, but that is only the beginning. The relationship is something each of us gets to define for ourselves, and in doing so, create meaning.
[1] Marx p. 57
[2] Marx p. 41
