Stay Tacky, My Friends (or, Shame and Wall Colors)

Me in a thrifted shirt that I altered with hand-stitched gussets under the arms

A reflection on culture and counterculture

...

I woke up sobbing so hard I couldn't breathe.

The dream had been innocuous enough— not something you could classify as a nightmare. In it, a couple people were looking at the walls in my dining room and discussing the color. "Oh, we used to use this color when we were renting. The paint is so dull. Poor. Cheap." 

This dealt my dream self such a massive surge of negative emotion that I started bawling, even when I floundered to the surface and found myself thrashing around, half awake.

Zach, also half-asleep, flopped over and put his arm around me, which grounded me enough to let the sobs subside. In the pitch dark, I tried to remember the dream, but all I could remember was the brief image in the paragraph above, and a series of thoughts that were crystal-clear and felt utterly true:

I am tacky.

I am cheap.

I am poor. 

Nobody likes me and everyone is embarrassed by me.

I have no clue what triggered it— I hadn't been thinking anything along these lines lately— but in the darkness of night, these statements felt too real.

It was the feeling I got as a kid when I realized that no one else at the produce stand was rifling through the fly-covered damaged fruit, which we got for a dollar a box. 

It was the feeling I got at REI that one time in the changing room when I took off the brand-new pants I'd been trying on (which didn't fit me) and put back on my worn-out, twice-patched, stretchy eight-year-old pants. 

It was the feeling I got when I tried to join a social group, but never did anything with them because all the activities cost far more than I spend on entertainment for a whole month. 

A friend told me a couple weeks ago that she admired Zach and me for our frugality, remarking that it must be hard to live so counter-culturally. I told her honestly that it wasn't, because Zach and I both grew up in this counter-culture where single-income households, penny-pinching, and a lack of conspicuous consumption were the norm rather than the exception. After all, how can I feel poor when the library and the riverfront park are a leisurely walk away?

But cultural conditioning is strong, and every once in a while, I feel it, if only subconsciously. 

As I laid in bed, heart still pounding from this unexpected flood of emotions, I had the presence of mind to remember a technique my therapist had told me. "When you hear negative voices, how do you talk back to them?" she'd asked. I stared at her blankly and said that it had never even occurred to me to talk back. She told me to try.

So I began, I am not tacky.

But that felt like a lie. 

I thought of Zach hanging his head in embarrassment at Easter dinner when I loudly announced that the apple butter I'd brought was made with dumpster-dived apples. I thought of the many times I'd gone out on the town wearing clothes so worn-out that you could see my skin through the stretched-out elastic. No, I can definitely be tacky.

So I tried a different technique.

If someone thinks I'm tacky, that's their problem.

If someone thinks I'm cheap, that's their problem.

If someone thinks I'm poor, that's their problem.

If someone doesn't like me, or is embarrassed by me, that's their problem.

The fears subsided under the power of these words, and soon I was able to go back to sleep, to peaceful dreams this time.

~~~

In the morning light, I returned to my normal state of mind: I'm honestly a bit proud of how tacky I am. Not for the tackiness itself, but for the underlying choices it represents. I'm happy that I follow in my mother's footsteps by rescuing food that others don't want. I'm happy that I wear and repair my clothes for years instead of sending them to a landfill. I'm happy that I've found friends who enjoy simple, free things, just like I do. These actions are a way of living out my values: simplicity, resourcefulness, contentment, creation care. (And, I feel compelled to note, not everyone has the privilege of being able to ignore what others think of them.)

But I have worries too. Worried about what other people will think, worried that I'm doing things "wrong," worried that I'm deluding myself into… I don't even know what. The worries originate in my brain, not my heart, the product of the anxiety of living in a culture that bombards me with images of what life "should" look like.

I don't often second-guess myself when I'm awake, so I guess my mind had to do it while I was asleep.

There is power in talking back to those worries. There is power in saying, This is my life, and nobody else gets to tell me what it should look like.

Whatever your fears are about the path you're on, I hope you find the courage and the words to talk back to them, so you can bring your whole, authentic self to the world. 

Stay tacky, my friends!

~~~