Editor’s Note: The title of this piece, which was first published in September 2011, called to me as a perfect to follow this past week’s Aries New Moon, with all those other planets in the sign of “I am.” — Amanda
By Maria Padhila
“Are you a collection of attributes that make you a desirable object, or are you something more?”
This is the question the acupuncturist put to me the other night. Hearing something like that, you can understand why I rarely go to any other doctor, and never to any other therapist anymore.
We talk, often for far more than 50 minutes, before she even gets started with any kind of treatment. And last night, she explained that it was time I made up my mind whether I was going to be real about all this — whether I was going to be a self, and regard myself as a whole.
Both marketing, the field I work in for a living, and the relentless push of social marketing urge us to think of ourselves as collections of attributes. Marketers call it that, right on the form we fill out when people want a product marketed — we begin to make a list of ‘brand attributes’. And people pay a lot of money to uncover these attributes, to find out whether the brand they’re trying to sell is one that people can trust, or that people find exciting, whether it’s homey and comforting or sophisticated and cool. What are your favorite movies? What are the five things you can’t do without? Are you Windows or Mac?
Of course, one’s brand attributes are part of the conveniences without which no one would have a conversation at the PTA or a first date. But what is the whole underneath these lists of features?
A young woman artist was talking with me about her husband and about my design for living. There are things about her that her husband didn’t understand, or that she didn’t feel like she could reveal without upsetting him. She was thinking about what I was doing, and said that it would be good to have someone else to soak up some of her intensity, someone to relieve the coziness of daily life, someone who “wants to have sex standing on our heads once in a while!”