The other day I was flipping through Oprah magazine while eating lunch. One particular article caught my eye. It had a clever title and spoke volumes, I thought, with only three words: The Raspberry Imperative. Beneath the title was a model dressed in a raspberry-colored dress. Without even reading the article I understood that raspberry is the new spring color and that it is imperative, if I want to be “on-trend” and societally appropriate,  that I fill my closet with it. Which wouldn’t be hard: I knew TJ Maxx and Marshall’s would be a sea of raspberry the next time I went in.

The problem is that  I actually only like the color raspberry on, well, raspberries. So what to do? As I saw it, I had three choices: I could embrace the trend and deck myself in raspberry threads, thereby ignoring my own sensibilities and preferences in favor of pleasing the trend-makers. This I was good at: hadn’t I heeded society’s mandate in the 1980’s that women starve themselves to the brink of death for the visual enjoyment of others? Did I really want to go down that road again?

I could refuse raspberry clothing as I’d refused  lime clothing in years past, only to come to love it once it was no longer in style (ditto capri pants, harem pants, belly shirts and shoulder pads). This had a hint of the rebel in it, for all the ways I showed up rocking said trend after its demise (though in truth I wasn’t so much rocking it as I simply didn’t have competition anymore, as everyone had moved on to skinny jeans and peasant tops).

Or  I could embrace some tiny facet of the raspberry wave–a hint of a camisole peeking out from a neckline perhaps? A raspberry-fringed scarf? This seemed the most open-minded, the least argumentative, and so I  put on my reading glasses to see if the article had some suggestions for how I might  work this compromise.  Which is when I saw that the title was not The Raspberry Imperative, but Transparent Motive. There wasn’t even a “The”; this I had added completely on my own.

It turns out that raspberry is not the color trend of the season, or maybe it is, but that’s not what this article was about. It was about how to wear dresses with see-through panels in a sophisticated, grown-up way, sans drama and the wrong things revealed. It was nothing I cared anything about.

I had to laugh. My brain had taken what it thought it saw and charged down a path of its own devising, plucking liberally from its own reserves of  obsession, fear, disappointment, reticence, and finally, concession. I had to hand it to it: it came eventually to a place of open-mindedness, of middle-ground over extremes. But there was still an edgy discomfort about the whole episode. As if I had not quite been the master (as Seinfeld might say, albeit about something entirely different)  of my domain.