The Color Pink

Identity cannot be found or fabricated but emerges from within when one has the courage to let go ~ Doug Cooper

This artifact isn’t a singular object, nor is it specifically any of the items included in the collage pictured. Instead, it is the color all of these items have: pink. While this artifact feels somewhat abstract, it still represents a crucial aspect of my worldview. While searching for artifacts to include in this project, I noticed an abundance of pink in my life. Almost every outfit I wore, bag I carried, items I decorated my dorm with, and doodles I colored my belongings with incorporated a shade of pink in one way or another. It was a lot of pink, but it was just a color; how could it hold any significant meaning to my worldview? 

I overlooked the possibility of using pink as an expressive artifact for a while. I simply saw it as a color I’ve loved since I was little. However, one day when I was still stuck on which artifacts I should include, I realized that, while I have loved the color since childhood, there was a period when I absolutely resented it. For a time, the color was associated with a specific persona and false identity that I was pressured to conform to by the community that I was raised in. When I realized the level of control and restriction that this community had over my autonomy, I felt a sense of betrayal and injustice. As a result, I wanted nothing to do with anything that reminded me of pressure to conform to a persona that did not reflect who I truly was. Slowly, over time, I learned how to reclaim aspects of my life from the limiting ideals I was raised in. This act of recovering pieces of my authentic self represents some of the key values in my worldview: personal growth and self-identity.

I was practically born into a very rigid religion that promoted strict fundamentalist beliefs, especially regarding gender roles and responsibilities. Ever since I was little, I was taken to Sunday school, Sunday evening services, Wednesday evening services, and church-related weekend activities. As one can probably see, it was a community that filled up so much of my youth with all of these different services and activities that I was expected to attend. Throughout my many years as a church member, their religious ideals, standards, and expectations were repeatedly enforced into my way of viewing the world and living. The preaching of fundamentalist beliefs turned even more forceful when I became a teenager. It was vital to the church that the young ladies were brought up with the understanding of the religious view of their place in society, which was often very limiting and misogynistic. Standards of femininity that controlled my autonomy and independence were presented to me as the only correct way to live; lifestyles that didn’t conform to their expectations of women were labeled as rebellious and wrong. As I grew older, I realized more and more how dominating and restricting these roles that were cut out for me were.

At the same time that I was experiencing the first aspects of my individuality and independence being stripped away to conform to these religious roles, my mom fully embraced issues that she had with the church. She decided to pull us away from the denomination. After leaving the religion and not constantly sitting through sermons indoctrinating my thinking about how I should view the world, I was able to see the extent of how much of my autonomy had been controlled by fundamentalist ideals. In this realization, there was a sense of betrayal as these people had been my main community for almost my entire life. Catching on that this community wasn’t truly welcoming or supportive, as they expected you to sacrifice your right to autonomy and independence, was especially heartbreaking. In an effort to remove the hurt as well as hold the church community had on me, I rejected all elements that typically contain feminine connotations, including the color pink. 

I self-separated myself from genuine feminine aspects, preferences, and qualities as a form of self-protection. After realizing how limited I had been in embracing my autonomy and individuality, I was determined not to lose these aspects again. The only way I knew how to do that at the time was to avoid everything that reminded me of the identity the fundamentalist views enforced on me, even if I had once loved those elements of life. 

For a couple of years, I explored new hobbies, styles, and interests that didn’t fit into the typical role of femininity that I grew up with. While I enjoyed and grew a love for some of these new aspects of life, it ultimately felt like I was missing a part of my identity. In hindsight, I can see how I spent a lot of time thinking that I needed to find “new” ways of identifying and defining myself when, in reality, I had naturally already found the hobbies, styles, and interests that complemented who I truly was. However, I allowed them to be tainted by opinions and ideals that were not mine. 

Even though I had left the religion several years prior, it wasn’t until I fully moved away for college that I was able to express my individuality comfortably. Taking myself out of the area and community I grew up in helped me feel comfortable reclaiming the aspects of my life that I had pushed away when trying to protect my autonomy. Experiencing leaving my first home to build a new one at college gave me insight into what I valued in my identity regarding views, preferences, hobbies, and qualities. In this new space, I was liberated from needing to protect myself from limiting communities and found the freedom to express my individuality, live autonomously, and embrace my own identity. Gradually, without even thinking too much about it, my genuine preferences reappeared in my daily life as if I had never refused my love for them. Among many things, pink started to fill my life again, and this time, I didn’t look at it through the lens of it embodying an enforced form of femininity but simply as my favorite color. 

This artifact of the color pink may initially seem abstract and meaningless, similar to how I viewed it when I was first picking out artifacts. However, understanding the different meanings the simple color of pink has offered me over my life so far reveals a much deeper and personal aspect of my view of the world. Through my childhood love of the color, my teenage resentment of it, and now my young adult reclaiming it, the values of personal growth and self-identity shine, representing the importance I place on autonomy and individuality and the circumstances that developed these values in my worldview.

Photo by Author