There are two things I truly, deeply, dislike in life: going to the dentist and packing
Adventure, travelling to uncharted lands, exotic places, Wanderlust… That's all fun and games until you have to pack.
Summer music hits and destination movies have done absolutely nothing to make me want to shove all my belongings into a box to, allegedly, have the time of my life somewhere exotic. On the contrary, I’d spend months going through the five stages of grief from the moment I purchased a travel ticket, starting with denial.
I would not tell a single soul that I planned to go somewhere, and then I would experience the harshest anger towards my inner child and my cat for not helping me pack. In my head, if you didn’t say it out loud, then it didn’t exist. Therefore, if nobody knew I was leaving, then I was not. And if I was not going anywhere, there would be no suitcase to fill. This is where all logic departs my brain and bargaining would kick in, which is just me spending weeks contemplating my life choices and procrastinating, all while my suitcase lays open in the middle of the room.
Upon reflection, I might even tolerate the dentist more than packing because I could tell them ‘I told you so’ when they confirmed what I already knew when I walked through the door.
“I haven’t seen you here in ages! When was the last time you got your teeth checked and cleaned?”
“I don’t know, like two maybe three years ago?”
“That’s way too long to wait! Why didn’t you come sooner?”
“I was busy studying abroad, crying, you know, the usual.”
“What if you had a cavity?”
“I don’t have cavities.”
I did not, in fact, have any cavities.
But my suitcase did not admit defeat and, most disappointingly, never laughed at my jokes.
You see, I had this wonderful one-liner about my plaque that was such a crowd-pleaser. The ‘crowd’ was an unimpressed dentist, hands deep into my oral cavity, and myself usually featuring metal hooks and mysterious cheek-sucking tubes making it challenging to deliver seamless one-liners. And right on cue, when they tell me my plaque is very hard and it’s all my fault for not flossing three times a day or not drinking enough water, or whichever diabolic consumerism trick they pull out of their sleeve, I simply say: ‘aeighow, hahshow eeyhlak whaawhea, ngh haeeweeg eek ahh asheej’.
Which means: ‘I know, that’s some great plaque right there, and I made it all myself’.
Then they booked me in for another visit which would be pushed back a number of times due to life stuff in a grotesque pantomime destined to repeat itself again and again.
For the past weeks, I spent all my energy coming up with a list of things to do instead of packing. Writing this list is the first step of procrastination. After crossing out ‘dentist appointment’ from my list, I had to do the dishes just for good measure and, of course, re-organising the whole spice cupboard because if I didn’t do it, then nobody in this house would ever possibly have time to accomplish such an important and insurmountable task. From the spice rack to the tea shelf is such a short distance that I’d be inconsiderate if I didn’t extend my services. Once done with the kitchen, it would be a good idea to clear out the table to better visualise the prospective packing items’ volume. But first, I cleaned the floor since a table is never enough and I couldn’t bring my suitcase up from the garage and lay it on a dirty floor.
In an unforeseen twist of events, it happened that I had accumulated stuff on said table that had no real home anywhere else, which called for a trip to IKEA to select a suitable storage solution, and then I had to build it and neatly arrange my things in it. Also, everyone knows one can’t pack if there is laundry to put away, so I lifted away a pile of clean clothes from ‘the chair’ to the wardrobe only to realise my wardrobe was an avalanche waiting to happen.
And we don’t want it to happen while I am away so I’d better tidy that up as well, and I might start writing a book, saving the world, and defrosting the fridge. My suitcase could wait, after all, I wasn’t going anywhere.
In my procrastinating phase, I turned to what can only be described as internet rabbit-holing. It’s like a ‘choose your own adventure’ but the internet was your book. Starting from an innocent video on the best folding techniques I clicked on an article with picture-perfect packing tips, then a blog about lifestyle, and from there to joining a cult it would be a very small step. Admittedly, I would much rather join a cult than put clothes into a suitcase.
I wondered if they even allow physical baggage in a cult, or if emotional baggage is more than enough. Maybe I should have considered it.
Where were all the neuro-linguistic programming workshops and random motivational strangers when I needed them?
New business idea: a personal trainer but for real-life struggles.
Don’t you dare say that sounds horribly like a life-coach.
Even better: a magic spell that summons personal motivators. I’d light a candle in my suitcase and say the words: winpackium suitcasa, and a luggage genie would appear. They would point at things for me to pack and tell me what a great job I was doing.
Depression truly assaulted me the days right before departure, as I had no other side-quest to take my mind off the current situation but crying. Which was the last thing on my to-do list.
Less than twenty-four hours before my flight, I finally cracked and went into full Tetris mode, meticulously packing my most prized possessions. Only, the blocks of items didn’t disappear, they wrinkled and squished.
What I learned from the internet’s collective wisdom is that one not only should avoid packing what’s trendy because trends will be different elsewhere but also avoid panicking in general, because panic is always with you.
Insert demotivational meme image.
Instead, one should bring comfortable clothes and not what’s new or experimental, plus, the general advice seemed to recommend removing something before closing the suitcase. Which was easier said than done, for a maximalist like I was.
By generational standards, I fell into the elder Millennial maximalist category.
We lived our high school years wearing multiple layers of tank tops, dresses over jeans, mini shoulder bags that matched our belts, and encrusting our bedrooms in makeshift wallpaper made out of magazine cut-outs, photos, and posters. Perhaps, I should have looked for specific Millennial-targeted advice. We’ve all grown up during a time when the internet was a luxury and personal computers were a family-shared item that impacted phone lines across the globe. We also all had a door-mounted structure to hold our accessories, and we basically invented makeup palettes because we couldn’t operate one shade at a time. We needed all the things all together.
I could see a light at the end of the suitcase!
B when I started typing ‘millennial packing tips’ on a search engine, the first option I came across was ‘millennial pink’. Despite sharing the B name.
Barbara, not the other word.
I grew up looking very different from the famously pink plastic doll, but I eventually came to a truce with the colour at least until Pantone announced ‘rose quartz’ as its 2015 colour of the year. So dainty and airy, pastel rose is an extremely graceful colour that evokes child-like innocence and sugary treats just as much as French Baroque powder rooms. Urgh.
We all know Pantone is the wishful thinking of style, as it either never guesses right or nobody else cares.
There is an unanticipated third option, which is what I want to believe in, and it’s that the World does the literal opposite of Pantone’s prediction. That’s why, in 2015, every Millennial bought a velvet green couch. A sturdy, grounded, mid-century modern ideal to counter-balance our cyber-existence and para-social relationships.
How did we get to the point that my whole generation is associated with an omnipresent shade of pale pink? Firstly we’re shamed for our skinny jeans, then for parting our hair to the side, and now we get assigned a pastel colour? Nobody asked if we, as a generation sitting on green couches in grey houses, liked it.
I was acutely aware that the rest of my clothes would sit in a dark closet, lost in time and space, torn between the carefree unemployed life I was leaving behind and the future city life I was manifesting. In a way, it was a strange kind of goodbye to my younger self. Shedding old skin is a rite of passage that I would not have done otherwise. At least would not have done it so soon, so suddenly, so completely. I am leaving behind a bedroom layered with posters of musicians and actors, art and poetry, and echoes of distant summer vacations. My very own real-life Instagram wall where memories are curated to make me forget the packing and pretend I am, too, a dainty pastel-pink soul instead of a black blob of pirate thoughts and anxiety. Of course, I treasure the memories of British party nights more than the actual frozen feet I was wobbling on.
We could try to live in the moment, but how long was that moment going to last before we were already editing it with the Instagram filters in our minds?
Did I genuinely like this millennial pink trend or had I been exposed to it consistently in my web-surfing to the point I associated it with happy memories and couldn’t remember a time when pastel wasn’t my thing? Most importantly, when did we stop wearing long sleeves under t-shirts?
Directly from the archives, please enjoy this authentic photographic evidence:
A procrastination queen! 😂 I can relate, and the resistance to the dentist 😂