Buying to Belong.
The Sober Glow Studio is an extension of what was started on social media circa 2016. As I have evolved, the topics I cover have naturally evolved. Here, I provide stories, recommendations, and resources on the art of living an alcohol-free lifestyle, navigating midlife, and anything that simply feels good.
I was never one of those girls who fit in. At the age of 7, my mother moved us back to a small town where her large family lived in order to get help raising me. Her youngest sibling (out of ten), who is only two years older than I and the spoiled baby of the family until I showed up, hated me. Her hatred only escalated when the hand-me-downs were given to us, and I was always gifted with cuter clothes, as her story goes. I have a different story.
Having had no real role models who demonstrated strong self-esteem or self-worth, my younger years were filled with angst and loneliness, with little comfort from anyone, and I was dying to fit in.
It was a real case of the Gen X childhood.
Right before third grade, my mother brought home two outfits from Kmart for me. I still remember what they looked like, and I was so damn proud to wear those cute little outfits over and over. That is until the other girls in my class started making fun of me. It was then that I realized my clothing was a dead giveaway that my family was poor, and if people knew I was poor, they wouldn't like me. My young little brain and body became acutely aware of how she presented herself and how people would treat her based on it.
When I entered my teen years, clothing rapidly became the holy grail of popularity. Since we still had no money, I needed to rely on my creative and rebellious spirit. Somehow, I got my hands on a single Guess triangle patch (yes, just the patch), but I have no idea where or how because I certainly didn't buy Guess jeans. But I took that patch and made it work for me. Every night before school, I would carefully undue my previous stitching of the Guess patch from one generic pair of jeans to another, making it seem like every pair I owned were Guess jeans. And those fucking red Levi's that I painstakingly removed every single signature stitch on the back pockets, so I could then sew on that popular girl triangle symbol, will forever be burned in my memory.
I mean, are you kidding me!? I want to laugh and give her a high-five for her tenacity. And also hold her so tight while she sits on the floor of her bedroom, hunched over a pair of red pants, trying to bite out the newly loosened white stitching with a mouth full of braces.
"Oh, sweet girl, hang on," I would whisper.
As I entered high school, I developed better time management, which looked a lot like me simply borrowing clothing from all of my middle-class, two-parent home girlfriends. But I took the same tenacity I spent on a small cotton patch and directed it into doing other things that would make me a cool girl. A cool, party girl.
Enter alcohol…