A green top, a simple question, and the feeling of being out of place

It was my first real internship.

I was working with the womenswear team at C&A’s offices in Alphaville, in the São Paulo area. For a girl from my background, being there already felt unlikely.

The women around me spoke about Daslu, a luxury fashion store, as a familiar reference. I knew the name, but that world of shopping was not part of my everyday life in the same way.

I brought knowledge and experience of my own. English, Spanish and French were already part of my life. I had set out to master those languages because I believed they would one day help me explore the world on more personal terms, connecting with people in their own language.

That desire to discover the world existed alongside a background in which my mother bought clothes at a street market. Both were part of who I was.

It took me a while to understand how much weight certain references could carry in that workplace. A brand or a place of purchase could be read as a sign of belonging, far beyond the piece of clothing itself.

One day, I went to work wearing a simple, bright green top my mother had given me. My manager looked at it and asked, with a genuine smile:

“What a lovely top. Where did you get it?”

I answered without thinking:

“My mother bought it for me at a street market.”

It was from Hering, a Brazilian clothing brand. There was nothing wrong with the top, the market or my answer.

My manager gave an embarrassed, awkward smile, as though she had asked the wrong question.

But there was nothing wrong with the question. Or with the answer. What hurt was the judgement I sensed in that smile when she heard where my mother had bought the top.

Until then, the market had simply been the place where a piece of clothing was bought. Her reaction made me feel that it had become a way of placing me socially.

I had told the truth. Yet suddenly I felt as though I had revealed more than the question called for. As though, in explaining where the top came from, I had put my own background on display.

What I was trying to defend

Over the following months, I turned that moment into something of a personal cause.

I kept saying exactly what I thought and making a point of showing where I came from, with a stubbornness I called authenticity. I told myself I did not care what other people thought.

There was truth in that.There was also self-defence.

I did not yet know how to separate wanting to tell my story from feeling compelled to defend it. Sometimes, keeping anything to myself felt like denying who I was.

Now I can see a distinction: being free to talk about your background is different from feeling you must explain the whole of it whenever one small part comes into view.

That does not mean my original answer was too much. It was a straightforward response to a straightforward question. The weight came afterwards, when I began to wonder what it might have revealed and what I was supposed to do about that.

A piece of clothing, a brand, a school, a holiday, a neighbourhood. Everyday details can take on other meanings in places where people have learned to associate them with particular ways of life.

Some grow up recognising those associations through the people around them. Others begin to notice them only when they are already being judged through them.

This is not a measure of intelligence or professional ability. It is a familiarity acquired under different circumstances.

Seeing yourself from somewhere else

In an earlier essay for Segunda Porta, I mentioned Nicole Stephens’s work on cultural mismatch. In a review with Sarah Townsend and Andrea Dittmann, the authors discuss how the norms of educational institutions and workplaces can differ from the ways of thinking and acting people learn in different social-class contexts.[1]

That perspective helps me place the discomfort somewhere beyond a supposed personal failing. The research does not address that particular encounter; it offers a way of thinking about the distance between entering a workplace and feeling at ease within it.

Reading Annie Ernaux’s Shame, I find another connection: the painful possibility of beginning to judge the world you come from by standards you have encountered elsewhere.[2]

The home, the habits and the people may be unchanged.The way you see them is not.

In that office, I began to look at the girl from Osasco through the judgement I had sensed in that smile. And for a few seconds, she seemed inadequate to me.

Perhaps that was the most painful part. There was no openly cruel remark I could push back against. There was what I felt during that exchange, and what I went on to do with the feeling.

What I might say now

If I were standing in front of my manager in that top again, I might say:

“My mother gave it to me. It’s from Hering.”

That would be true. But “my mother bought it at a street market” would still be an equally valid answer.

The difference I want now is not a better way to conceal where I come from. It is the freedom to decide what to say without shame, without needing to make a point, and without turning the conversation into a defence of my life.

Not every question invites a personal story. Some do. Learning to recognise the difference allows me to decide what to share, with whom and when.

It also helps me notice when my discomfort says more about the standards of a particular workplace than it does about me. Understanding those standards does not require me to accept them as fair.

The problem was never that my mother bought clothes at a market. It was the feeling that such an ordinary detail might change how I was seen and, for a moment, how I saw myself.

I do not want to respond by monitoring every word I say. I want to speak with greater awareness and less need to justify myself.

There are many moments at work when this learning comes into play: a disagreement, a conversation about ambition, a decision to share something personal. For those who did not grow up familiar with that world, some of this understanding develops while they are already doing the job, delivering results and trying to find their place.

Segunda Porta grew out of that experience: the wish to put words to what took me years to understand, so that other women might recognise what they are living through sooner and make their own choices.

My mother bought that top at a street market.

That sentence belongs to my story. Today I can tell it without turning it into a source of shame, a statement of defiance or an apology.

The girl who answered that question did not need to come from somewhere else to have a place in that room.