The International Writers Magazine: Pink

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Never Have Me • Natalie Tehranie My msn screen name reads: "Princess Nat-I’ve got a castle in my room!" My bedroom is very pink. The walls are covered with pink birthday cards, notes from my friends and various pieces of fancy dress. My mirror alone is adorned with fairy wings, a wand and a pink dream catcher with a fairy on it. My bed is covered in a pink duvet, splashed with pretty flowers. Sitting on my pink pillow is an array of cuddly toys and a Tinkerbell cushion. My notice board is bursting with smiling faces of posing girlies and memorable moments

I am a very girly girl and this is evident in my room. So I guess you could say that my possessions tell you a little about me. They are a part of my identity. But they don’t define me. There’s a lot more to this young woman than her love of the colour pink.

Yes, I do love pink, glittery objects and cuddly toys because I think they are sweet and they let me stay young. I suppose they remind me of childhood; when we were free to just be. Run around naked screaming "I want chocolate" when you’re three and adults sigh and say how sweet you are. Do this now and you’ll find yourself either in a mental home or prison.

I think the problem with possessions now is that people place too much emphasis on them. You are judged whether you like it or not, on what you wear, what phone you have or what car you drive. Girls will actually consider not dating a guy if he doesn’t drive. Believe me. I am one of those girls. I promise I am not a shallow person and if I like someone it wouldn’t matter to me whether he drove or not; but like almost every other girl on the planet I do see the perks of having a boyfriend who can drive.

I wouldn’t want to be judged solely on my possessions, sometimes we cannot afford the latest trends or don’t want them. And why should we have to have certain things for people to like us? Yet most of us still play the game. We fall into the hands of the fashion industry and follow the Celebrities who we moan about over our highly fashionable Starbucks coffee cups.

No one is an individual anymore. The individuals aren’t individual because they are trying to being individual; along with the other half of the planet who decides that this week they are going to be different.
When did we get so materialistic? I remember liking toys when I was younger but I wasn’t constantly asking for the latest Barbie doll. Although saying that I do remember once, feeling deeply disappointed when I received a Sindy doll one year instead of the Barbie I had wanted. But at least I had the decency to feel guilty. I knew, even then that I should be grateful for what I got.

Perhaps then materialism and the need to possessions is programmed into us at birth. Along with the highly irritating obsession we seem to have as humans to want whatever it is we can’t have. Didn’t Eve want the apple, she wasn’t content with living in paradise and neither are we. Our old 3310 Nokia phones were fine, they worked but no we have to have the newest technological masterpiece, because this one not only takes pictures but it prints them too! Perhaps a slight exaggeration but you get the general idea.
The problem is that there is too much choice. If you want a pink phone, you can have it. You want red hair with blue stripes in it, it’s yours. People can even buy babies on the internet now. Illegally of course; but what is happening to society? Why would anyone want to choose their babies eye colour or the size of their feet? This defeats the point of having children, people are meant to be individuals, a miracle of life. They are not meant to be moulded out of clay, or scientific experimentation.

So you see I have views, I have questions, I’m an inquisitive person but who would have thought that from my room. I can just imagine doing a survey and asking 100 people what sort of girl do you think lives here? How much do you want to bet most would make comments like: blond and girly or pink and obsessed with fashion. I doubt anyone would say that I seemed like a lovely, intelligent, down to earth girl. You cannot judge people by their possessions just like you cannot judge a book by it’s cover. This has been said for years and yet people still do it. And they probably always will.

Throughout history possessions have defined what class you belong to. Perhaps if you aren’t born into money you can never quite be one of the aristocracy but you can acquire wealth and be in the middle classes. This whole class was created because people made money so they weren’t poor yet they weren’t of noble blood either.

I think that possessions are an aspect of yourself but not a definition of who you are. I asked my flatmate what he thought n the issue of possessions and he said that if he went into a room full of star trek posters he would assume the person that lived there was a geek. The thing is, a lot of us probably would. Possessions are always going to form part of your identity. We live in a materialistic world so it is inevitable. Perhaps it is time to start thinking how we want to be judged and whether these possessions suit the image we wish to portray of ourselves. I think we need to be careful as a society not to go to far; we must remember what is important in life and not let the latest pair of hot Topshop boots we just ‘have to have’ let us lose sight of that.
© Natalie Tehranie November 2006

Nat is studying Creative Writing at the University of Portsmouth
 
 
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