Karen is partly modeled on the sweet middle-aged Southern women I teach yoga to and absolutely adore. Karen is the part of my personality that adapted to tend to the parts of me that were once deprived or wounded and then grew up believing themselves to be permanently deserving of that deprivation and those wounds. But she became a necessary part of my life here, enabling me to think and interact with the world in new ways. Before Alabama, I’d never needed a fully fleshed out alter ego. Taming all my chaotic spontaneous whimsy into a new life that demanded so much order was disorienting. It was a choice to stay in place, to put down roots, to try to make a life I would want to hang around in for a while. If every other shift I’d weathered was the result of some spontaneous now-or-never jump into the unknown, going to grad school was a much weightier decision. And every time I changed course, I’d had to make new friends, new routines and reinvent myself to adapt to a different environment.
I was a beauty queen, a tourism director, the content manager for Jet Li’s now-defunct martial arts website. During this time, I basically started a new life every six months. Prior to school, I’d spent a few years outside of the U.S., mostly in the region of the Philippines that my mother is from and across Southeast Asia. Technicolor fur collars in the South? Forget about it, honey. I created Karen when I first moved down to Alabama for grad school, when the whole international-eccentric-art-girl aesthetic I brought with me from a media job in Taipei was garishly out of step with my new life. Karen, my therapeutic alter ego, whom I created to organize my tupperware, take the blame for my online shopping habit, and demand to see your manager, is a Maxxinista. Hello, my name is Sarah, and I am a Maxxinista.
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