GIRLHOOD

<3 another girlhood essay <3

An unedited behind-the-scenes clip from my forthcoming YouTube video essay on girlhood and consumption. The essay below is something of a shadow to the video essay—it was necessary for me to write this in order to create the video essay, which is more impersonal. (Yes, I’m lying on an immigrant blanket.)

“Want some tea, too?” I asked my aunt as I walked out of the office with her son.

“Tell me!” she said eagerly.

“Not that kind of tea,” I replied.

“Tea,” the colloquialism for gossip, was not what I meant, but I understood her confusion. The last few months of my life has felt like a reality TV show, filled with drama and colorful characters. Narrating my experiences have helped me feel more in control. However, like reality TV where there are no true espial moments to be delivered, my storytelling is more about post-production gloss than revelation.

The tea my aunt thought was gossip was actually Puerh Tea (pronounced poo-err), a fermented black tea from China. A vintage seller had recommended it to me earlier that day, and it had greatly improved my mood.

This vintage seller, in his 60s, runs a shop I stumbled into after my sewing class. After 45 minutes of small talk, I asked him, “Do you think you’re a hoarder?”

I recognize my own impulse to collect things—CDs, magazines, designer bags, trinkets—is rooted in trauma. Growing up in a severely cluttered hoarder home, the clutter came to symbolize everything: our enmeshed family system, our class ascendance, our overconsumption, our memories.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu says that while the poor prioritize practicality in their tastes, the middle class seek social and cultural capital through them. This pursuit often facilitates conformity—assimilation through accumulation. Hoarding all of the nice things we paid for feels like an intensely middle-class expression of trauma, not to mention our most tangible claim to Americanness. It’s not just about accumulating objects; it’s about forming a personal taste and style out of these disparate items, creating a selfhood from our consumer choices. This is the mimesis-producing absurdity, superficiality, and quasi-fiction of identity—its formation—in a nutshell: our identities are hardly our own; they’re communally authored by external influences, consumerism. This is hyperreal individualism. This is girlhood.

At the moment, I’m interested in upcycling, which is why I’m taking a sewing class. I want to make beautiful creations out of the clothes I can’t fit into anymore after losing over 100lbs, because I refuse to throw anything away. These clothes I refuse to let go of are not just things; they ground me, remind me of where I’ve been, and offer a glimpse of where I might go. They provide not only aesthetic pleasure but also relief from pain. I know it’s pathological how badly I want to hold onto things, how even my hobbies and relationships have come to represent my anxious attachment. Collage art, the main artistic medium I practice, has become an extension of my hoarder tendency, creating palimpsests of everything, knowing that I can't erase the past, but I can write over it. I can sew over it. I can hold onto everything I touch and never let go.

During the pandemic lockdown, I gained 50 pounds. This video serves as evidence of that, but it also documents my life in general. The house I’m sitting in is my childhood home, which has since been renovated into a millennial grey aesthetic, and all the stuff we hoarded now sits in storage.

“Yes, I’m a hoarder. I have PTSD,” he replied. “The objects I collect won’t hurt me the way people have.”

“Me too,” I said.

In 2021, I was formally diagnosed with Complex PTSD, which jump-started a healing process punctuated with numerous bouts of self-abandonment. It’s cliché to say that healing isn’t linear, but my post-pandemic life is proof of that. The false starts and various disruptions have produced a zig-zagging pattern, similar to the cross-stitch technique recommended for mending frayed edges.

More proof of an unglamorous existence. The shirt I am wearing in this video is one I am deeply attached to and intend to upcycle into something new.