silkidelic

In this world, I never stood a chance against consumerism.

My brain came online in the early 90s, screaming for sights and sensation, and the world rushed to meet it. Peppermint-scented teddy bears, battery-powered Barbie cars, glittered-maned plastic ponies, shock-haired trolls with precious gems in their belly buttons, dolls with designer wardrobes, candy of every neon taste and color (artificial watermelon being the best), lip balm that smelled like soda.

It was a fantasy world, with a strict delineation between girls and boys. I was given the assignment of being a girl, fated long ago to be the most succulent meat for the grinding guts of materialism.

My family was middle class, sensible with money and careful not to spoil us. My mom constructed by hand our Halloween costumes, party decorations, and birthday cakes, with the traditional New England frugality and ingenuity that are among our few cultural indicators of unconditional love. My brother and I didn’t watch a lot of television, and the Internet was all but irrelevant to my day-to-day life until the age of 8. We were outdoor kids with groups of friends, even though I harbored a solitary inner realm of hidden chambers and talking animals.

As we roamed our forest-lined neighborhood, the world of consumerism was ever closing in. A series of shelves, TV spots, and magazine ads barricaded my existence with a suffocating shiny-plastic message: Consume! I didn’t have the direct power to do so, and my parents didn’t suffer begging, but the seeds of needless want were planted from the start.

And here I am, a binge-purge consumer, forever stuck between desiring the moral purity of minimalism and the hedonistic delights of shopping. I am the perfect mark for our society’s highly marketable obsession with both virtue and vice.

At the same time, I like what I like. I don’t know what I would have liked, had I been born into some anti-capitalist utopia on a far-flung moon, but sometimes I suspect it would be similar. It is the packaging and the cycle that are imposed upon me, not the inherent desire.

Here are some items that I’ve loved since sentience spread its rays across my mind: bright color, scintillating light, the scent of vanilla, the taste of berries. Recently, I’ve found them again and again on shelves in beauty chain stores, sold back to me in vials made from the compressed matter of cyclical life, floating in a clever suspension of poison.

Anointed, I feel a fragment of that original joy, which I’ve been told I lost, like a careless child who dropped a plush toy in the supermarket.

But I remember now, the wrenching of it from my hands.

How do I retrieve the things that I’ve been told are frivolous, that were taken from me and sold back at a premium?