Task 1: What’s in your bag?

What’s in my (gym) bag?

Exercise and gym – basketball shoes, workout gloves, water bottle, lock, deodorant

Diabetes related – Insulin, needles, juice, granola bar, gummy bears, cannister of glucose tabs, medical alert bracelet, CGM patches, CGM protector

Other – tissues, sunglasses

I go to the gym five to six days a week, so my gym bag gets frequent use and has become a part of my daily routine. The items I carry fall generally into two overlapping categories: those required for sports and workouts and those necessary for managing my type 1 diabetes (T1D). Together, they offer a snapshot of the literacies, practices, and identities that structure my everyday life.

Items I use daily include my shoes, gloves, and water bottle, all of which are essential to each training session. I began wearing workout gloves during the COVID pandemic, when my gym at the time made them mandatory. Over time, I’ve realized that putting them on signals a shift into an “active” mindset, and their use is more important to me affectively than functionally. I also carry deodorant and a lock, items that are not directly related to exercise itself but are necessary for navigating shared public spaces, as well as sunglasses, which speak to mobility and movement between indoor and outdoor environments.

A second set of items is directly tied to my T1D management: an insulin pen and needles, fast-acting carbohydrates (juice, glucose tablets, and gummy bears), a granola bar for slow-acting carbs, a medical alert bracelet, and protective patches for the continuous glucose monitor (CGM) I wear on my tricep. The foodstuffs and insulin are non-negotiable. Without them, participation in everyday activities, particularly physical activity, would be unsafe.

Items as text

These items can be seen as non-linguistic, sociocultural texts that communicate meaning through use, context, and necessity. They speak to the fundamental human drive of continued survival and to the learned practices that make my survival deliberate, practiced, and routine. My T1D, diagnosed just before my fortieth birthday, fundamentally reshaped my daily life, and in this image we can interpret that transformation as a visual narrative. The insulin, needles, and medical bracelet communicate illness, while the carbohydrates represent preparedness and anticipatory decision-making. The gloves and CGM patches, meanwhile, represent two different forms of resilience through technology: resistance training and cardiovascular exercise, both of which play a critical role in my daily glucose control. If technology is text (Peña, n.d.), and text is creation (Scholes, 1992), then these items represent a variety of creative forms: insulin is tikos as medication; glucose management is technē, both an art and a skill; putting on the gloves transforms me into a tektōn, or craftsman, slowly sculpting my physical body from one form into another.

These items therefore point to two interrelated literacies: diabetes management and fitness. The former is essential for survival and involves ongoing interpretation of bodily data, risk assessment, and decision-making. While my gym bag (surprisingly!) contains no digital devices, digital technology is nonetheless central to this literacy, as my CGM transmits glucose data via Bluetooth to a mobile app. I also regularly use a traditional blood glucose meter (via finger-pricking) to verify this data. Fitness, meanwhile, is a literacy developed through long-term participation; I’ve come to understand my own body, its capabilities and limits, and intrinsically developed best practices for achieving fitness goals, avoiding injuries, and navigating the unspoken agreements in gym culture (wipe down the bench after you’ve used it!).

The contents of my bag also reflect the places and communities I inhabit — fitness centres and basketball courts in particular. Notably, both my shoes and bag are from Nike, which could be interpreted as an interest in brand identity or image. In reality, brand played no role in either purchase. However, my basketball shoes do carry cultural and linguistic significance. I began my career in education in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where I taught ESL from 2006–2009. One of my students during that time was a quiet nine-year-old named Luka Dončić. If you are in any way familiar with basketball, you may recognize that Luka has grown into a current NBA superstar and global basketball phenomenon. The shoes I wear are the Luka 3, and inscribed on them is sedeminsedemdeset, the Slovenian word for seventy-seven (his jersey number).

This shoe, then, is a personal and cultural artefact that connects language learning (I studied Slovenian extensively while living there), language teaching (which became my career), basketball (my life-long passion), and story-telling and narrative (my friends and family are well aware that Luka was my student!). Besides that, Slovenian as a language is highly complex and relatively obscure, a description that also resonates with my experience of T1D. That these aspects of my identity converge in a single, regularly worn object highlights Scholes’ (1992) description of texo and texere; multiple narratives are woven together, carrying layered personal and cultural meaning that may be visible only with a pre-existing awareness of the shoes’ significance.

A representation of self

I have never been a particularly private person, and the narrative produced by the contents of my bag closely aligns with the identity I project publicly. I speak openly about my T1D and readily discuss fitness or basketball with anyone who is interested. In this sense, there is little tension between my private and public selves; the artefacts in my bag accurately represent both, and consequently, represent me symbolically as well as personally.

A future interpretation

If an archaeologist were to encounter these items in the distant future, two features would likely stand out. First is the relative absence of digital technologies. While many contemporary bags might contain phones, earbuds, or tablets, my gym time is intentionally screen-light. This absence may appear to be a rejection of technology, but it’s actually a selective engagement with it, an intentional limiation on digital intrusion. A future observer might misinterpret this this bag as a lack of technological use, rather than recognizing the absent but essential digital technology supporting my health.

Second, an archaeologist might be struck by the sheer volume of plastic. With the exception of my lock, bracelet, and cannister, every item incorporates plastic components. This could be interpreted as a symbol of our material era: convenience, disposability, and environmental negligence. In this way, the contents of my bag do not merely reflect my personal literacies, but also the technological and material conditions of this current time.

References

Peña, E. (n.d.). Thinking about text and technology [online]. https://canvas.ubc.ca/courses/179955/pages/1-dot-5-thinking-about-text-and-technology-2?module_item_id=8719770.

Scholes, R. (1992). Canonicity and textuality. In J. Gibaldi (Ed), Introduction to scholarship in modern languages and literatures (2nd ed., pp. 138-158). Modern Languages Association of America.