If You Want to Change Your Life Change Your Underwear

by Bonnie Zavadil Macaraig

Every week I receive Dr. Alan Zimmerman’s motivational e-mail with a “Tuesday tip” of inspirational insight. A while back the email contained the quote, “if you want to change your life, change your mind.” I found it insightful enough to write it on the white board in my office, where it stayed until one morning I walked in to find that someone had changed “mind” to “underwear.” After recovering from the exposing image imprinted on my brain, it dawned on me that the phantom white board tagger had it right.

Dr. Zimmerman’s quote is insightful if you are only concerned with changing your intentions. The world is filled with people who really want to make a major life change and fully intend to improve their lives, but keep on doing the same dumb stuff that got them into their situation in the first place. We all know the smoker who vows to quit after “one last cigarette.” And, what about that monthly “donation” to the gym? Real change requires a decisive action. So, thanks to my whiteboard writer, my mantra has become: “If you want to change your life . . . change your underwear.”

Our underwear reflects every major life passage that humans experience, from the day we leave diapers, to the day our loss of bodily control puts us right back into them. Whether we actively make the choice, or circumstance dictates, when we make a major life change our underwear makes a major style change. My son is a perfect example. Before his first day of kindergarten he insisted on replacing his cartoon character emblazed briefs with clean, white Hanes. Entering kindergarten meant he was a responsible young man with real things to do. Wearing Spiderman on his behind was just too much of a reminder of the ‘little kid” he had been the summer before. His briefs were his symbol of growing independence; his secret mark of maturity.

More than our choice of a car, our choice of underwear emanates the essence of who we are, and as in my son’s case, who we want to become. We’ve abandoned many social rites of passage, but a change of underwear still manages to fill the void. Traditional cultures held ceremonies for a girl’s transition into womanhood. Today, that’s about the same time a barely teen runs out to Abercrombie to buy her first thong. I can always spot the swagger of an adolescent girl wearing a thong for the first time. Every time she bends over in her plumber-crack jeans her thong reverberates to the world, “I have become a sexual being.”

Conversely, I have a forty-something girlfriend who successfully wore “granny panties” in her youth as a chastity belt to prevent her from sleeping with a guy on their first date. The more she liked him, the further she kept him from discovering this extremely effective prophylactic.

I still can’t figure out why men who hit 40 turn to black underwear . . . and I’m not sure I want to.

It could be that our ignorance of underwear’s power just may be sabotaging our self-improvement efforts. Just think of the control we could have over our lives if we put as much effort into buying our underwear as we do our self-help books or the next “miracle” skin cream. Our underwear drawer is the last place we consciously look to when initiating a tough change in our lives, but maybe it should be the place to start. I experienced my moment of truth when I folded an entire load of my mother’s underwear, which wouldn’t have been such an epiphany had they actually been hers . . . and not mine. I realized then and there that the only way I could stop the process of physically morphing into my mother was to run out to my local lingerie store and replace my supply of granny panties with something I would expect the hip me to wear. It not only did the trick, it also opened my eyes to other aspects of me that I had begun to let slide . . . like my butt. So, take if from me in my low-rise bikinis, if you are serious about changing something in your life . . . start with your underwear.