“green is a lovely color, it is the color of Islam, it is my favorite color”
-The Life of Pi, Yann Martel
What is your favorite color?
A simple question, one we’ve been asked ever since we were capable of understanding it, only, it doesn’t take us too long to answer it. While other personal questions like a favorite book or show or even a favorite food have a certain degree of background to them as we are prepared to justify our partiality towards said book or show, even going to great lengths to explain why it meant so much to us in a burst of passion and excitement, we don’t second guess why our favorite color is what it is.
In my case, going as far back as preschool, I remember my favorite color being obviously pink. My bag, my wardrobe, my pencil case- everything I owned back then had at least a splash of pink on it. I remember being so casual about it that when my sister teased me for being so basic (hers was blue), I didn’t bother defend myself. When a classmate claimed he liked it too, I felt strangely irritated, how dare he claim something I always knew was mine?
Now that I look back on it, I didn’t even think the color as particularly pleasing. Then, why was I so protective of it? Why did I claim it was my favorite when I didn’t even like it?
Maybe because it was all I had ever known.
It was the color endorsed by my parents, as they went along with the dreaded gender stereotype, and I didn’t ask for a pink bag at first, it was pushed into my hands. Gradually, everything else I owned became pink. I didn’t question it because I was a child who wanted to please her parents. I longed for my parents’ validation and gladly accepted any pink product that was lovingly bought for me by them, only, it was their thought that they were bestowing upon me something that I wanted, something that I preferred.
A chain reaction, you could call it.
Every time I ‘chose’ something pink, I was convinced that I was climbing another step towards my parents’ acceptance and love.
Maybe, that is what the color pink meant to me, though it could have meant something entirely different to someone else. After all, we all do have our own stories.
Towards the fleeting age of eleven, I had decided I was allowed to have two favorite colors. As a child who was about to enter ‘the awkward years’, my intentions were always based on standing out, my choices grew on the concept of being ‘different’.
As it turned out, my favorite colors became blue and purple. Thank heavens, it wasn’t pink anymore. Instead, it was a color that was widely regarded as the opposite of pink, thanks to the gender stereotype, and a color I just thought was pretty to look at.
As you would’ve observed, I wasn’t too worried about the particulars. I needed two colors to refer to as my favorites and they absolutely couldn’t be pink. Mission accomplished.
As I turned fifteen, I was undergoing bizarre changes in attitudes and of course, my first self-acknowledged experience of love. Seeing that I had initially thought I would’ve settled with indigo, the color I claimed was my favorite at fourteen because it helped me make decisions faster than my brain had ever done as my decision-making ability -especially when it came to clothes- amounted to a pile of dog- do, you could say it was quite a drastic deviation when I fell in love with gray.
To make a long story short, the person I was attracted to often wore a gray t-shirt and whenever I saw a flash of gray fabric anywhere, I was reminded of them. And so, it was officialized in my head. My favorite color was now gray.
Years passed, and I stuck to gray for a remarkable period of time. Then came other passing love interests but I remained faithful to the dull hue.
I once read a post that began with the words “She guessed my favorite color first try” and of course, I was interested enough to read it. With all due credit to the Tumblr user @whoarei, who is the source and Pinterest, where I had found it, I hereby quote it.
“she guessed my favorite color first try.. but between me and u ....... I didnt even have a favorite color until she yelled out yellow!! she was hella excited n smiling like a little kid. so i told her she was right and i havent seen yellow the same since. its in everything. I could probably live in it now.”
While the degree to which OP was starstruck is adorable, I’d like to focus your attention to how they/ she/ he discovered their favorite color in the unique way that they did. For all I, a virtual passerby, know, it wouldn’t probably be their favorite color twenty years from now, or it could be, but that’s what the whole point is.
Depending on how deeply embedded in your heart the memory that is subtly entwined with the color you associate as your favorite is, the longer it will remain commanding that position. I may be wrong, but what I like to think is, that our favorite colors aren’t fleeting choices we happened to make in the spur of the moment, however ‘basic’, in my sister’s words, they might be. To elaborate, I prefer to reason that all our favorite colors trace back to a memory that is close to our hearts or a subconscious thought that is too stubborn to leave the depths of our minds, each more unique to the person it belongs to than the last.
Before I conclude, I’d like to strengthen my opinion further by bringing to your attention another post by a user named Ashley on the list making site li.st where we witness another association of a favorite color to a memory that stayed with a soul the most.
“After a great doctor and a lot of work, I can see just fine now,” she wrote, “but for a while in my childhood, after a period of nothing, all I had was light and dark.” During that time, she explained, her friends and family tried their best to translate feeling into color, reframing sights into experiences that didn’t require the sense at all. Here are a few:
Red:
They had me stand outside in the sun. They told me that the heat I was feeling is red. They explained that red is the color of a burn, from heat, embarrassment, or even anger.
Blue:
They put my hands in their pool. They told me that that sensation I felt while swimming, that omnipresent coolness, that’s blue. Blue feels like relaxation.
Green:
I held soft leaves and wet grass. They told me green felt like life. To this day it is still very much my favorite color.
If someone who had never seen colors before could assign so many beautiful emotions to them and choose a favorite, then it must be something deeper and more significant that lies behind our answers to ‘What is your favorite color?’, doesn’t it?
Your favorite color may be something absolutely unattractive for another to look at but may bring unadulterated joy to you when you see it as the color of the cover of an old book your mother used to read to you. It may be something stereotypical to your color, race, gender or sexuality, but who cares? It may be the last personal attachment to your fondest and even forgotten memories and that’s the reason as to why you find it so endearing or even, thought you did so.
And everywhere you go, you will always see the colors that stand as vivid reminders to those buried memories or persistent thoughts. And in everything you see, you will always find a color that links you to something close to your heart.
about the author: the actual wanted to remain anonymous but also wants you to know she likes books and music only to use them as excuses to run from the present. keeps getting lost just so she could find something close to her again.
and according to Charu, she’s been ‘listening’ to the dear evan hansen soundtrack for a year now. (listen to it!!!)
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