Whiteness, Stains, and Bleach

Have you ever tried to wash stains out of white clothes? Any stains – – grass stains, food stains, dirt stains; stains from everything and anything at all.

Have you?

…I have.

I own a gorgeous pair of white jeans (probably gorgeous only in my opinion, since they’re my only white jeans), and I’ve been trying to wash some wierd stains out of it for the past two months.

I don’t know where the jeans picked up those stains, or even what kind of stains they are. They aren’t very conspicious; if you’re not looking for them or if the lighting is wrong, all you’ll see is just a pair of whitish jeans.

You’d be thinking that they were white and that the whole outfit should go together; but it doesn’t, and then you seem to see something out of the corner of your eye, and you bend over and hesitantly pitch, ‘umm is that a stain’?

And of course, you bring the jeans to the laundry room ASAP to deal with it.

Something about this sound familiar, but not in a clothes-and-laundry context?

It was while running my fingers and the material under hot soapy running water that insight suddenly hit me.

Getting a stain on that white material is so easy; it can be done in one second, or perhaps even less than that.

But getting a stain off white material isn’t so easy; it takes a lot of patience, a lot of scrubbing, loads of dynamo and plenty of bleach. To add insult to injury, you can’t even be assured that you’ll get the jeans back to normal at all in the end.

Kinda of like, trying to bleach blood or dirt off snow so that it’s white again. Or, removing crassness from a person so that they become refined again.

While reading an article just now I came across the following sentence: ‘it is a thousand times harder to unlearn something than to learn something’.

And I thought, how true.

I spent 15 years… argh okay, so my parents spent 15 years… moulding me into this perfectly lady-like child who said please and may I and thank you, knew what to say and what not to say in formal dinner occasions, who could smile and flatter, and play the piano and cross-stitch a frame, and sit ramrod straight and exude a genteel air.

Then I spent 2 years trying to break from this mould, to find my own personality, to stop being the china doll who was put on display with her academic trophies from school.

That must be the phase where white jeans were used while sitting down on the grassy ground.

Afterwards I spent one year with partial freedom, away from house and home, away from the watchful and over-protective eyes of parents who imagined that I didn’t know what the anagram to FCUK meant.

Hmm. That should be comparable to the stage when the jeans started being worn to any and every occasion that they could, regardless of what surface they would be in contact with and what kind of situation it was.

And now I’m in uni, and into my second year away from home.

There’s been more wildness. More swearing. More drinking. More dissolution. More slipping into a world that I would have skimmed 10km away from just 5 or 6 years back.

Say I were this pair of white jeans, which came to me last year before I arrived in Australia.

Say I hadn’t been bothering about how many stains I’ve picked up through the sixteen or so months that I’ve tasted independence… until now.

Say I got a wake-up call.

Say that since then, I’ve been trying to wash off these stains now that they have become apparant to me, but despite my best efforts so far, all that the stains have done is move around the jeans to settle in other areas.

This only led me to wonder: What kind of bleach would be strong enough to restore these jeans to white?

What kind of tempering would I need to go through before all the swearing and all the roughness, and all the sarcasm and all the thorns, are drawn out of the fabric of ‘what I am’ so that I can return to ‘what I was’?

Indeed… what?