Today I saw her again. That girl. She was standing in line at a boutique in front of me arguing with the storeperson about the availability of sizes. She had a perfect tan and that sun-kissed I just walked off my daddy’s yacht look (daddy being used in any capacity you can think of). She was wearing a thong, which I could tell by the tightness of the flimsy pants she had on and she was sporting a chic hat from this season’s collection, I overheard her say to a friend. Lately I’d been confronted with this girl more and more. Wherever I went shopping I would find her. In Ralph Lauren with her daughter in tandem sipping on champagne and trying on dress after dress. In the street walking with her little miniature handbag and medium sized dog (it seems that toy dogs are out). At the taxi stand clicking by in her high heels, weary husband in tow. I don’t know if I had never noticed her before, but lately she seemed to be everywhere.

You know that age when you think it’s still cool to slum it. When staying at a hostel seems like an exciting way to meet new people and shopping entails leafing through tons of goods at a vintage store? It seems that I have passed this age. Yesterday I walked into a second-hand store and glanced at the collection before immediately walking out again. It was stuffy. It was dark. I couldn’t get any air. I had to be out. Lately all of my shopping exploits looked this way. I enter a shop, browse through the goods, barely touching them, before immediately exiting from whence I came.  As someone who used to be quite a good shopper, this change worries me.

Enter that girl, my latest fantasy of what it means to be a woman.  That girl is different from every woman. She is perfectly coiffed and stylishly dressed. She has on a non-descript designer bag and sensible-heeled but cute shoes. In summer she is probably in sandals, showing off her freshly pedicured toes. She’s tall but not too tall and has the perfect slim body made for showing off clothes.She is never carrying too many bags even when she has shopped a lot (where do her bags magically disappear to?) and while not exactly a minimalist, she does balance the perfect amount of accessory per outfit.  She can be found in a group of like-minded women, each vying for role of alpha, but she’s often alone (the faster to get her shopping done). That girl is the shop queen, she knows all the storepeople or gets to know them in a second and has all the big shops rounded up within the minute. I don’t know why shopping and that girl are connected in my head—probably because she spends a good amount of her time shopping—but in theory she might just as easily be a businesswom. I think it has something to do with the fact that when we’re hunting for stuff we’re also hunting for new parts of ourselves. When we’re on the prowl, everything is fair game, including another woman’s look. Am I really the type of woman that wears blazers? Do I feel comfortable in heels? Is a scarf really an accessory for me?. That girl for me symbolizes everything I can’t have but aspire to.

At this point I wonder if you have your own “that girl”, that unattainable vision of what your life could be if things went a certain way. I don’t know if it’s healthy to have a dream based on envy. If coveting someone else’s life is necessarily the way to go about changing your own circumstances. And yet, envy is a strong mover. If you want a surefire way of getting someone to change their place in life, just surround them with all the things they can’t have.  It used to be for me that that girl was a fit health freak with dewy looking skin and an approachable smile.She was calm, she was down to earth, more pura vida than Prada. But with some newfound changes in my life, that girl has also changed for me. She has become a more sophisticated, “cool” version of what she used to be. Now that girl is champagne and caviar, exclusive parties and weekend getaways, many languages, good breeding and well reading. I don’t know what about me has precipitated this big shift in values, but it seems that when we reset our systems some of us go back to our programming. And it looks like my programming is rooted in class over sass. Hence, that girl.

I bet you’re asking yourself what we get out of this phenomenon of that girl? Is it a motivator to change our lives? Is it a reality check? Personally I have been very affected by that girl this go round of my life. Coveting something I don’t value (or don’t think I value) has functioned as a wake-up call for me. Something is clearly off when I become jealous of a woman because she is wearing a Stetson hat. And yet jealousy has not gotten me to move, neither backwards nor forwards. Ideally, I would pay it forward and forge this jealousy into something fruitful, but I don’t really know how. So, I keep shopping. For a new me, for a new take on the old me, for some new ideas on transfiguration. 

What does your that girl look like?

Do you think we are destined to moon after what we can’t have?

Is there a progressive way to transform envy?

Guiltily yours,

Girl With One Earring

Photo Credit: Akram Reda