Merry Christmas! Some Ideas for the New Year

My dear readers - friends, family, and the one or two strangers who have found this little corner of the net - thank you for checking in on my weekly ramblings this last couple of months. I have enjoyed sharing with you some of my thoughts and lessons from my previous shopping ban attempt, as well as staying accountable in my current attempt. I'm intending to take a couple of weeks' break from blogging for the festive season, but before I go I want to give you a few tips that I have gleaned from this process.

Tried and Tested Tips

If you have read this far and relate to much of what I have said, I strongly feel you should consider doing a shopping ban of your own - it's a challenge everyone can learn something from. If, however, you really can't face that, another experiment you could try, perhaps in the New Year, is to pick a category of your belongings - books, clothing or make-up, for example - and try not to buy any more until something in that category actually needs replacing. You may be surprised by how much more you have than you actually need. For example, I was amazed to discover at the end of my first year that I had only worn out a single pair of socks, and still had more than ten remaining bottles of body lotion! (It's now a year and seven months since I last bought: socks (or any kind of hosiery), handbags, scarves,  knickers, perfume, eyeshadow, nail varnish, stationery, furniture, DVDs, CDs, collectable figurines of any kind, yarn, jewellery or tech. Have I run out of any of these things? Not even close.)

Here are a few of the most important things I have learned in the year-and-a-bit since I started trying to quit shopping:

1. Browsing leads to spending. 

Don't make it easy for them to keep you hooked. Put down your phone. My life became so much better when I stopped feeling obligated to compare EVERY dress on ASOS.

2. You don't lose anything by not buying something.

3. There isn't One True Garment that will reveal and encapsulate your identity.

4. You can't shop your way to a sense of self.

In fact, overshopping was part of what eroded my sense of self in the first place. 

5. Use and value what you already have.

6. At the end of your life, you won't wish you'd spent more time shopping.

7. Express yourself through your actions, not your purchases.

8. Take inventory.

Counting your stuff is not the most fun way to spend time, but it's harder to convince yourself you really need another t-shirt if you know you already have 63 t-shirts. (Yes, actual number. Have I not mentioned I have an overshopping problem?)

9. Consider your priorities.

What are you giving up if you keep spending your money on unnecessary trinkets? A house deposit? That trip you've always wanted to take? Your security or peace of mind? What if you saved that money instead?

10. Don't broadcast everything.

A private life is a happy life. I used to pour myself into social media in the name of authenticity and then always felt I had to live up to the image I was creating. Your choices become limited when you feel you should be promoting or explaining them to an audience. Deciding to be more mysterious was one of my best decisions to date.

11. Let go of perfect.

I learned during wedding planning that perfection is a tyrant. Embrace 'good enough' and be liberated. My hair, my skin, my smile, my wardrobe - not perfect, but good enough, and that makes me happy every day. If you let go of perfect, you only have to meet your own standards - not society's, not Instagram's. (If your own standards still feel too high, can you try to see yourself how your friends and loved ones see you? Beyond facial features and body shape, true beauty is in the way you light up, the way you talk, smile, laugh, move.)

And Lastly

This week's accountability - well, a mixed bag to report. I did have to shell out on a new pair of shoes - as I've mentioned before, I often suffer with plantar fasciitis, and this week it's flared up badly. After watching me hobble around in agony for a few days, Dai insisted it was time to replace the battered pink Reeboks I've been wearing for the last two and a half years. So I've ordered these amazing cork shoes with a "foot mattress" insole from sustainable, ethical company Po-Zu. I hadn't actually bought shoes in over two years (!) which I guess is pretty good going. I did resent replacing the Reeboks as they haven't actually disintegrated yet, but they have seen better days, and I can't keep up with my toddler when every step feels like walking on needles!

Unfortunately, I had a weird few days over the weekend when I didn't like what I saw in the mirror, and by Tuesday I was once again convinced I needed a total change of wardrobe. I felt sick of budgeting and thinking about money and 'stuff' all the time. I bought the Spud some lovely pyjamas, dressing gown, dinosaur t-shirt and a toy car (no regrets there, also not a ban break) and then I bought myself a cardigan from The Ragged Priest (in the sale) and a new book (Embrace Your Weird by my woman crush Felicia Day, can't imagine why that spoke to me at the time). So that's a third strike - time to start my day count from the beginning, I guess!

I should note that my little spree coincided with a) a heavy bout of Pinterest use - must quit, it clearly is the devil, and b) menstruation. I suspect a few of my shopping binges have coincided with that particular joyful time of the month - not sure yet how to guard against Shark Week Brain and its demand for extreme makeovers. Anyone have any suggestions? I must admit, I do sometimes let eco-guilt (or mum guilt) get in the way of actually taking the time to enjoy my clothes and appearance and then I end up feeling rough and frumpy... Perhaps this is something I can work on. I struggle to convince myself that it isn't selfish (or a sign of sinister corporate/patriarchal brainwashing) to want to feel good about the way I present myself. 

Have a wonderful, imperfect, being-"safe"-in-weird-pandemic-times Christmas, and I'll see you in the New Year.

How Extinction Rebellion Stole Christmas

As Christmas approached in the first year of the shopping ban, my newfound frugality and burgeoning environmental awareness were twisting me in knots as I tried to think of ways to participate in this orgy of gift-giving without decimating my savings or trashing the planet more than I could help.

Not too long before, I'd heard some rumblings about this radical environmentalist group called Extinction Rebellion who were protesting in London, bringing city streets to a standstill, arguing against Fashion Week, and otherwise generally making a nuisance of themselves. I was intrigued. All this passion, chaos and rage seemed to have boiled up very suddenly out of nowhere - what was going on?

I'd had vague positive feelings about Greenpeace for a long time, but by and large was convinced that all that environmental stuff was pretty radical and woo-woo, the province of earnest, slightly scary hemp-smelling people with hairy armpits. But XR was not only huge but encompassing all kinds of people, grandmothers and businessmen and schoolchildren. I decided to look them up.

Game changer.

With my sleeping child in my arms, I watched an XR video entitled The Truth. At first I was just interested. Then I was shocked. Then I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. As the girl with the punky haircut explained feedback loops and melting permafrost and food shortages and rising sea levels, I gripped my tablet in numb hands.

Does everyone know about this? Why isn't everyone panicking? What have we done? Oh, holy shit...

The full scale of the climate emergency caught me off guard and unsuspecting, a sucker punch to my sense of security and stability. I'm not ashamed to say, I wept. I'd brought a child into a world with a very uncertain future, and I felt powerless to protect him.

Let me loop back from existential dread to Christmas shopping (two things that go nicely hand in hand, I often find). After learning about the climate emergency, I found I had no more urge to buy joke presents, or anything really that people might not want or wouldn't use. The first year of the ban I was just a ball of stress - eco anxiety plus wanting to find the best possible gifts plus money being a little tight equalled worry from October onwards.

Some of my friends arranged a Secret Santa using a wishlist app. Enthusiastically, I filled my list with books, bath bombs and charity gifts - only to discover that the theme for the event was "dirty/inappropriate". I felt deeply humourless and a bit of a wally but just could not bring myself to buy a plastic penis of any description having just watched XR's video about, basically, the end being nigh (in the end I plumped for a book of howlingly bad self-published erotica and, okay, a penis-shaped lipstick. Apparently there's a gap in the market for sustainable or zero-waste erotic gifts...). I kept picturing every hen party inflatable penis sticking up from landfill - outliving us. What a legacy for the human race! (Told you - humourless.)

For everyone else, I considered crafting gifts, and whilst this is something I've got more confident about recently (this year I've given a knitted hat, handmade candles, body scrubs, elderflower cordial and blackberry liqueur), in 2019 I was still wrapped up (pun intended) in consumer culture and I was worried I would seem stingy or thoughtless.

Instead I decided I would support small local businesses. This turned out to be a bit of a bust - in my small town I only knew of a few local craftspeople, and I quickly discovered that doing my entire Christmas shop with them would leave me all but bankrupt. Eventually, cross and frustrated, I did my shopping exactly as I normally would, except I shopped in my hometown instead of travelling to a big city mall or market (and minus the "one for you, one for me" mathematics I have been known to apply in years previous!).

This year I was better prepared. I shopped mostly online (pandemic!), but I chose items from small businesses in the UK and favoured companies using sustainable materials and processes. It all sounds a bit "worthy", I know, but I don't in good faith want to keep pouring my family's resources into environmental destruction. To me, it's been worth a little more thought and a little more time. 

I also bit the bullet in the first year of the ban and had a chat with friends about setting a budget for our gifts, as in our mutual affection and enjoyment of gift-giving it was all getting a bit out of hand. One or two friends suggested that we no longer buy gifts for each other but focus on the littles instead. The rest of us agreed a £5 budget, which chafed at first but came to remind me of childhood Christmases, when we were given "token" gifts (often practical or edible) which were given with great love but caused the giver little stress, financially or otherwise. I also have one friend with whom I tend to exchange secondhand books - it works for us.

I realised that my personal Christmases had been overshadowed by worry. I was overthinking it, competing against the imaginary Joneses and their perfect Christmas gifts, frightened of appearing cheap (when money's tight for pretty much everyone right now anyway) and it was leeching all the enjoyment out of the process.

So please know, friends and family, that I may not have got you much this year, but I chose as carefully as I could, with the best of intentions! 

This Week's Accountability

Happily, I can report that I am now over fifty days into my current ban and doing well. Admittedly I have spent more this week than I normally do, but within shopping ban parameters - I have finished my Christmas shopping, posted the majority of my cards, and bought some local cheeses, chutneys and other nibbles (and driven Dai mad by pronouncing 'chutney' like Schmidt from New Girl), and some mulled cider and mead - I'm really looking forward to tucking in with the family over Christmas.

Comparison, the Gremlin On My Shoulder

The Comparison Trap

By July '19, two months into my first attempt at a year's shopping ban, I was becoming irritated by my inability to stop thinking about clothes. On days out, I found myself constantly playing the comparison game against other women, and I'd noticed the snarky voice of my inner critic carping at me: "This isn't cool, that isn't cool, it doesn't look right, your shoes are wrong, you haven't got the figure for that, who do you think you're kidding?" It was the inner voice of my younger self, who had enough self-awareness to want to try to be cool, but was never quite able to manage it. As an adult, I wasn't concerned with being cool - far better to be happy, or enthusiastic, then to keep chasing an ever-changing target (also I basically live by this page of the Incomplete Manifesto for Change) - but apparently no one had told the gremlin on my shoulder.

When friends visited, I felt sloppy, awkward and underdressed. If I put on make-up and made effort, I felt overdone and vapid. Whatever I did, I perceived myself as somehow wrong and out of place. I felt deflated every time I saw someone with what I perceived to be a better outfit, and became envious of women who didn't seem to care what they wore and were still at ease with themselves. I was getting increasingly frustrated, and wanted to just forget about how I looked. When had my appearance taken over my life to this extent? Was I completely vain, brainwashed by a misogynistic culture, or both?

It was as though the disordered eating behaviours I had overcome had simply been replaced by other damaging behaviours. I had read so much about body acceptance and self-love, but I had to face the facts - if I really loved myself, I wouldn't be spending my hard-earned money to fix imaginary problems, or constantly comparing myself to strangers.

I wanted to try to find an identity beyond clothes (and shut up that stupid little voice for good), and I decided that the best way to do that was to stop thinking about clothes:

- No Pinterest

- No style blogs or style guide books. The latter were consigned to the charity shop with a glad heart 

- No Instagram

- No browsing shopping sites, street style sites or Googling "fashion icons" , in fact no clothes-related Googling at all

- No fashion magazines

- No browsing the high street

- No mentally cataloguing other women's outfits

Just wearing the clothes I had. 

I'm not sure if this is a personal quirk or a common side effect of using these platforms, but when I have occasionally used Instagram or Pinterest in the year following, I have noticed a corresponding drop in mood, and more likelihood that I will make an unnecessary purchase (usually make-up or clothing) in the days after. So for myself, I have decided that these platforms are not healthy and don't contribute anything to my life except feeling vaguely low and crappy. That doesn't mean it's always been easy not to use them! Instagram, in particular, has a tendency to draw me back in. But I'm working towards a complete break.

Comparison was an extremely difficult habit to escape. There was a point when I thought I might never free myself from it, and was doomed to spend the rest of my life measuring myself against every woman (and occasionally a man with an outfit I particularly liked) that I encountered, and finding myself lacking. It took about ten months (ten months!!!) of avoiding fashion content and trying to notice and disrupt my negative thought patterns (I named the gremlin on my shoulder Keith; for anyone else who has a similar gremlin, I highly recommend Anuschka Rees's book Beyond Beautiful) before I suddenly noticed that the urge to compare had just... fallen away. Shrugged off, like an old coat. I cannot overstate how liberating this felt. 

On the Bright Side

Happily, a couple of months in, I was beginning to really enjoy the shopping ban. The stress and anxiety I had felt back in May were replaced by a newfound pleasure and satisfaction in removing myself from the consumer rat race. I had taken myself away from a source of guilt, envy, frustration and confusion, and I was achieving a simple joy from using what I already had. After trying for several years to catch up with myself, I was finally down to just fourteen unread books, and in the hotter weather I'd discovered that a handful of tops I'd thought weren't right on me actually looked just fine with skirts or culottes. 

It was frightening to think what I could have spent in the two and a half months since starting the ban if I had continued unchecked. Worse, there was nothing at all I really needed, so I would have just found things I quite liked and convinced myself that they were necessities. It's amazing how brainwashed we are into consuming as a way of life, and it was a relief to take a step back and look critically at the mechanisms at work. 

Accountability Corner

One benefit of giving up shopping that I noted this week was that, as a direct side effect of giving up the preoccupation with my appearance that constant shopping had contributed to, I find my range of interests expanding. I am more likely - and able - to pay attention to a passing whim (say, to plant vegetables, practise my guitar, or seek out a book about prehistoric matrifocal cultures or Japanese folklore), instead of reserving my time and attention for the constant tweaking of my physical appearance and planning what clothes I'm going to buy next. I hadn't realised to what extent I was stifling any interests that didn't relate in one way or another to my personal presentation. (Bet my mother noticed, though - she's disturbingly acute about things like that.)

Right, enough musing - on to the nitty gritty! I am delighted to report no ban breaks this week. I have purchased nothing but groceries and some cream for the baby's bottom. I can also see a notable change in my savings rate since reading Your Money Or Your Life, which is really exciting to me!

Fast Fashion, Black Friday and "The True Cost"

I'm going to begin with my accountability this week, because last week's impulse dress purchase really annoyed me! Don't get me wrong, it's a gorgeous dress, and in many ways it was a 'sensible' purchase - secondhand, discounted, versatile - but one thing I have learned during the year and a half I've been doing this experiment is that the more rigidly I stick to my self-imposed rules, the more change and freedom I experience, mentally and emotionally.

Full disclosure, I did make two artist-supporting purchases this week, a considered decision I was financially comfortable to make (I did feel a big guilty twinge so had to go and re-read my own rules post to remind me that it was OK! Need to watch that guilt reflex - yes I want to stop overshopping, no I don't want to beat myself up about it or end up pathologically unable to buy myself things ever). I bought three hand-painted patches from a local lass to cover a hole in and generally spruce up a patterned vintage cardigan I bought in a charity shop last year, and an anti-capitalist mini-zine from another feminist artist (wow I'm so punk rock and stuff) for the princely sum of £1. So, not breaking my official rules, not breaking the bank, and actually mending my knackered cardigan. Everything cool here, accountability team?

This week, I was also lucky enough to get an advance review copy of Jill Chivers's book Shop Your Wardrobe. I read Jill's blog in its entirety during my early shopping ban attempt, and it kept me going - chatty in style, indomitable in spirit, and full of reflections and experiences in which I could recognise myself. I was hoping that her book would do the same for me this week, and perhaps help me get a grip on the monthly blips that are blighting my current attempts to stop shopping. I certainly enjoyed reading it - it was warm, and funny, and very reassuring. Even Jill had a ban break.

Perhaps a year without any shopping whatsoever is an unrealistic challenge. In many ways I worry about what I am giving up, and I often feel discomfort about what I might be missing out on. But I've had glimpses of a life without the urge to buy, buy, buy, and so I know that this constant wanting is just a product of my conditioning. I want to get to the other side of that, and see what it's like.

Fast Fashion's True Cost

During my first attempt at a shopping ban, I watched a documentary called The True Cost, which shows the damage caused to people and planet by Western society's addiction to cheap, fast fashion. (If you haven't watched it, I'd certainly recommend it.) In silence as the credits rolled, I felt the weight of all the clothes I had bought and never worn and given to charity shops, the impulse buys, the shopping sprees, the sale 'bargains', the piles of clothes on my bedroom floor, trampled and unappreciated.

For so many years I had bought unthinkingly, never stopping to consider where my clothes had come from, whose hands had cut the cloth and stitched the seams. I knew about sweatshops, of course, we all do - it's an uncomfortable truth we dance around and ignore as we pile clothes into our baskets in Zara and H&M. We are proud of our bargains. We think we are savvy shoppers. Meanwhile workers labour for a pittance in unsafe buildings and are gunned down in the streets protesting for fair pay.

My concerns about being the worst-dressed in my friend group, the problem of having too many clothes, seemed suddenly inutterably, pathetically first world and shallow. My shopping ban took on new meaning as I realised that my greed and wastefulness were contributing to this horrific state of affairs. In the face of Rana Plaza and the thousands of garment workers who died when the building collapsed, I sat mute, shocked and guilty. How could we be doing this to each other? In the name of fashion?! It was madness, that people were injured, dying, rivers poisoned, children enslaved, so that we in the West could continue to buy - and thoughtlessly dispose of - more cheap clothes and fleeting trends than we know what to do with. A truth we all live with and ignore, because it might be inconvenient. Because we might have to stop what we are doing. Because we might have to admit we don't really need another pair of pyjamas or jeans or cute summer dress or this season's colour handbag and actually we already have too much...

For a long time I had avoided looking at myself and my habits, at the impact of my actions. Now I had stopped avoiding the facts, I couldn't put my head back in the sand. It's too easy to gloss over where things come from, and although I'm only one person and I knew my shopping habits alone wouldn't change the world, I also knew I didn't want to be part of the problem and keep contributing during my lifetime to such a harmful industry.

My plan going forward - after the shopping ban - had been to try to save money by buying clothes more cheaply. Now I don't think I could buy a brand new £12.99 dress without wondering which individual, less fortunate than myself, is carrying the real cost. Yes, I need to save money, but perhaps the best way to do that is to just not buy so damn much and to start taking better care of what I already have. 

Black Friday

On a related note, tomorrow is of course Black Friday, when millions of people annually trample each other, break the internet, and actually kill each other to spaff billions of pounds on things they don't need, want, or have room for, largely because those who profit from it decreed it should be so.

Obviously I will not be spending money on Black Friday, but I do encourage my non-masochistic-shopping-ban-doing friends to join me in turning up our collective nose at this orgy of greed and consumerism. Fashion Revolution reminds us "it would take a major fashion CEO just four days to earn what a female garment worker makes in her lifetime". Please, let's stop encouraging this culture of exploitation. Together we can hit them where it hurts - in the wallet.

Doing It For The 'Gram

"We're all self-expressing. It's the conformity of our time," - Adam Curtis 

A Holiday From Wi-Fi

When I was pregnant with my little boy, I went to Wales with my partner and his father - two large, affable, mischievous Welshmen. It was a real, proper holiday, the kind of holiday I hadn't known I needed until I found myself in the middle of it, breathing a sigh of relief.

You see, on this holiday, we had no Wi-Fi. No phone reception. I found myself, for the first time in eighteen years (give or take), cut adrift from the internet. 

And this turned out to be a bigger deal than I had expected. 

This holiday was to a location where my partner (let's call him Dai) and his dad regularly liked to go, plus or minus a motley assortment of brothers, sisters, nephews (my son is one of seven grandsons) and dogs. It was not, therefore, selected via Trip Advisor. I had not spent evenings browsing Canopy and Stars for a location with maximum Instagrammability. It was a place where I could feel things, do things, think things, but not share them. It was a place of realness, of being - ironically - connected.

I found myself in the back of the car one evening, easing along a narrow, winding Pembrokeshire lane in the last of the summer sunlight. One hand was resting on the swell of my bump - a by-now-automatic gesture - and I found myself thinking about the baby.

We had decided to keep the baby's sex a surprise. And I - with my history of internet obsession, constant diets, and total preoccupation with my appearance - found myself in paroxysms of terror... What if the baby was a girl? How would I protect my daughter? What could I teach her that would keep her safe from the crippling messages - how to look, dress, behave, think - that society insists women must labour under? Though my baby was a boy, he needs me just as much as any daughter would have, and he needs all of me - not the spare bits left after a wedding diet, or the half of my brain not preoccupied with writing witty captions for his Instagram photos.

Since childhood, I have felt driven to document my existence. As if, if I didn't present the sum total of my life and experiences for others to review, to admire, to pass judgement on, I don't really exist. Therefore, to find myself under the warm summer sun with nothing but a good book and good company - and no way of telling people about it - I at first felt anxious, panicky. What use was a holiday if no one knew what a good time I was having? What good was it to relax if that girl I fell out with three years ago wasn't jealous of how damn relaxed I was? Every trip I'd taken since the advent of home internet had been dissected online, sometimes for a wide audience during my stint as a Goth blogger. My trip to Cornwall several months previous had been photographed from every angle, and at the end of each day I stretched out my legs on the floral duvet of our B&B bed and presented that day's doings to Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. As though that had been the point. 

Part of the reason I stopped blogging was because I had started living my life FOR the blog - choosing my activities, experiences and outfits through the lens of how I would write it up later, and what I thought would look good to my readers. My every movement, choice, purchase was curated for my invisible audience. Instead of being me, I was performing me. 

And now, a decade later, I still hadn't stopped. My image had changed, my platform had changed, but the actions were the same. Haul posts. Selfies. Outfit of the day. (And here I am blogging again! Irony, right?! But I'm hoping that weekly posts and relative anonymity will allow me a creative outlet without turning into MY ENTIRE LIFE.)

Instagram was my favourite platform. I posted daily. My phone was connected to me by an invisible umbilical. Once outdoorsy, I could no longer function without WiFi. Worryingly, I noticed my attention span being obliterated - I stopped being able to read books without checking my phone every few paragraphs, then lengthy articles. I struggled to take in the meaning of the words on the page, I was so preoccupied. Soon I couldn't follow the plot of a movie because my attention was on my phone. My writing, a constant since childhood, dried up. In my teens, when we still had dial up and a PC, I'd often been online up to eight hours a day. Now, I was waking up at 2am to check for new likes.

At first, Instagram recaptured my childhood joy in documenting my world. From mixtapes to diaries, I have always enjoyed the process of capturing and showcasing snapshots of a given moment in time. My first really big purchase, circa age thirteen, was a handheld camcorder, which saw years of heavy use as my friends and I recorded interviews, snippets of daily life and deeply questionable comedy skits, before VHS technology became sadly outdated. 

So at first blush, I thrilled to Instagram. I used it like a photo diary, but four years in, using the app for around five hours a day, I was not only addicted but concerned about the messages I was putting out. Look what I've bought! Look how quirky I am! Notice me, you guys, I'm being authentic as hard as I can! Again, my life had become about how it appeared from the outside. I was desperate for people to see the 'real me', to notice my uniqueness. Eventually, I began to feel almost as though the things I did weren't relevant if they weren't documented on Instagram. 

Technology and shopping became irresistibly intertwined. Like an influencer? Buy her outfit. Toilet break? ASOS awaits. I didn't realise that what I was doing, essentially, was continually marketing to myself. I couldn't stop shopping until I stopped browsing. And when I tried to stop browsing... I couldn't.

Authenticity and Consumption

Everything we do is online. For a long time, I thought that the best way to be myself in a world where everyone is watching was to strive for total transparency in the name of authenticity. I figured it was kinda punk of me to post bedheaded, no-make-up selfies, to not (appear to) worry about whether or not I looked good. 

However, I wasn't doing anything in real life. Life was something that happened around me, outside the bubble I was in. Just as I once did with my Goth blog, I was buying things and going places purely to have the photo to post online. Case in point: I recently looked back at photos of me that my friend Alice took when we had a girls' weekend in London. In all but one candid snap of me, guess what I'm doing? That's right, I'm on Instagram. Head down, looking at my phone. Even in the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Even in the National Gallery, for chrissakes. 

I was addicted to Instagram just as I had once obsessed over my blog, to the detriment of all else. Except modern apps made the addictive, obsessive behaviours even more damaging - not only was I once again pouring all my time into an online persona, but this time the nature of social media meant that it was affecting my confidence, my sleep, my memory, my ability to converse... I was scrolling through Instagram during conversations, under the table (how rude and obnoxious!).

Even GoodReads, which I had previously thought of as a fairly innocuous way to discover new books, has its pitfalls. For the uninitiated, GoodReads is an app where you can track what you're reading, read and share reviews, and get book recommendations based on what you've liked. However, GoodReads also runs an annual reading challenge, where the goal is simply to read a number of books (you choose your mileage) in a year. Reading has always been one of my greatest pleasures, but I found that the GoodReads challenge turned it into a numbers game. I wanted to get lost in books again, to meander and amble, not plough through them to meet an arbitrary goal. Like so much of modern life, GoodReads puts the emphasis on consumption, rather than enjoyment. 

Escaping from my need to present my life, my thoughts, my heart and soul online, was difficult. Each day with my baby boy, I yearned to post each new expression, discovery and sound. He quickly learned to hate my phone as a rival, beginning to cry each time I reached for it. When I started the shopping ban and was forced to cut down on browsing time, I remembered that trip to Wales and how pleasant life could be when I stopped being under the thumb of social media. Reading what I want - no GoodReads challenges. Life for living, not a continual performance.

Life Without The 'Gram

June came hot and humid. I'd deleted my social media apps and found myself abruptly adrift in reality, without the crutches I had become accustomed to. I started sleeping with my phone outside the bedroom, turned off notifications for email, and used my tablet only for reading ebooks. At first I was irritable, anxious, checking phantom vibrations and hiding my phone in ever more tricky-to-access places to stop me picking it up habitually. I installed a timer app to keep my usage under control.

Unable to shop, unable to kill time on social media, I found myself suddenly in possession of swathes of time. My son was no longer a needy loud creature distracting me from the important things I needed to do online, he was a little person, desperate for his mummy's undivided attention. I started baking cookies. I invited friends over. I caught up with Vikings and Bake-Off - able to watch entire episodes at a time, something I couldn't do when I was entirely caught up in gadgetry. I started to go outside, taking the Spud for daily walks in the buggy. 

Unfortunately, this newfound reengagement with the physical world proved to be my downfall, albeit in a very minor way. On Day 35, my dad took me and the Spud to a village fete. It was idyllic, quintessentially British; a blue sky with fluffy white clouds, thatched cottages, bunting riffling in the warm breeze. Spud and I shared a bowl of fat ripe strawberries and cream in the shade of a mammoth oak tree. And, entirely without thinking, I got chatting to a local beekeeper selling her wares, and cheerfully, unthinkingly, broke the shopping ban - a £1 honey lip balm! 

I didn't even realise what I'd done until we were in the car on the way home, and then I had to laugh - of all the things I could have bought, it certainly could have been worse. At least I'd supported a local craftsperson with my slip, and I was hardly the last of the big spenders! Still, I was a little disappointed at breaking my streak, and astonished at how mindlessly I had made a purchase.

Small mistakes aside, it was during this month that the reality of my financial situation began to sink in. With no further income of my own, the years ahead looked bleak and frightening. I started looking at our household budget to see what could be tightened up, the beginnings of an interest in frugality and thrift, a mindset which both my parents had tried to instill.

In an odd way, I felt sad at times at the prospect of going for such a long period without just buying whatever I wanted. But I could already sense that it might come to be liberating; more money for travelling, meals out, days at the beach, and freedom from indoctrination - perhaps I might develop an immunity to advertising, social media envy, comparison. How good might it feel, to just step off the consumer carousel and walk away?

Accountability Corner

Lastly, a little update on how I have been doing this week - up until this morning, I can report that things were going really well, I am at 33 days into my ban and counting. I actually felt I had a bit of a breakthrough this week. Something expensive I'd been thinking about buying for a while was on special offer. My partner suggested I was clear to make the purchase, as it leaned more towards the experiential than the material (although on reflection I'm not sure I agree). I got as far as adding to cart and entering my details... Then I closed the tab. Because I'd approached the purchase more slowly and thoughtfully than usual, I was able to notice that I felt uncomfortable and recognise that spending the money wasn't sitting right with me, instead of just pushing on anyway for the buying high. Later, I learned that the purchase wouldn't have met my needs anyway, so I'd saved myself an expensive flop.

However, this morning I found some Re-Fashion discount codes when I was deleting old emails. I didn't want them to be wasted, so I offered one to a friend and used one myself - £5 off a £15 dress (Collectif, purple velvet wrap dress - stunning). I okayed the purchase in advance with my partner and my mum (as you do!), and they both said it didn't count as a ban break. But I'm not so sure - was it a good use of resources available, or technically breaking my own rules, second-hand clothes still being clothes? Let me know what you think!

I'd also like to say thank you to my talented friend Georgie of Georgie Writes, who inspired me to start this blog in the first place and has been ever so encouraging and supportive, and to all my other friends who are taking the time to check in here every week and see what I'm rambling about. Thank you so much for reading my words!

Identity & Me: The Quest to Be 2D

Day One of my first shopping ban - May 14th, 2019 - started badly. I had expected to feel Zen Master pure, worthy and brimming with self-love, so of course the baby had a bad night, I screwed up my knitting pattern (oh, the horror) and I felt wretched, gross and crabby. My adjustment to motherhood had not been smooth, and occasionally I wondered if I could be depressed, but generally chalked it up to being flat-out tired and missing my pre-baby headspace and autonomy, a state I had been self-medicating with those huge shopping sprees on my tablet during the late-night feeds.

It was an eye-opener of a fortnight; I balked and struggled at every turn. I went through my bank statements from January to May and wrote down exactly what I'd spent on frivolous purchases - a deeply upsetting exercise, but a necessary one, after which I had a good cry in the shower and felt deeply ashamed for a long while. I came clean to my partner about the money I had wasted and how tight things now were. It was not a pleasant or a comfortable conversation, but he accepted the news with surprising calmness, though I felt terrible.

And yet, I was heartened. Each time I had previously attempted a shopping ban, by day three or four I'd discovered something I absolutely HAD to have. This time, I'd tried to minimise the amount of time I had to spend battling against myself and cut down on my online browsing. Physical shops, I simply avoided. I had come to see that sometimes in all my obsessive browsing I was merely looking for a fix. Instead of focusing on what I really needed, there were times when I was buying just to have something. To get the buzz that came with typing in my card number.

And the days ticked on by without a slip-up.

The "Trance of Greed"

Thirty days is commonly the minimum length recommended for a shopping ban. Not as dramatic as a year-long challenge, but long enough to reset, to break free just a little from the gilded cage of constant advertising and the unrelenting pursuit of more. Sure enough, by mid-June, I was starting to gain a clarity I had been missing. 

In physical shops, it was usual for me to fall into what I thought of as 'the trance of greed', whereby I became so focused on buying it was impossible for me to concentrate on anything else. If a companion tried to chat with me, I could feel my eyes darting past them, desperate to ensure I wasn't missing something I might want. I could hardly follow a conversation, and at times even became irritated or angry at being distracted from shopping.

With hindsight, the ubiquitousness of technology - and thereby marketing, via email offers, influencers, shoppable Instagram feeds and targeted ads - and its constant presence in my life had led to a constant, low-level trance of greed. When I wasn't shopping I was thinking about shopping, planning purchases, creating moodboards to define my 'style concept' to help me decide what to buy next. I was absorbed by social media, permanently distracted by the shiny and new, reliant on the next thing, or the next, to fix the sense I had that I was lacking in some way. As I stopped shopping, my ability to concentrate increased. I found I was more patient, more alert, more interested, less distracted. It was as though I had been hibernating, and was now emerging into the fresh air.

I discovered that I could like stuff without having a picture of it on a T-shirt (if you are a bit geeky, then you too may know - the lure of merch is strong). Strangers could get to know me by talking to me instead of analysing my outfit! Who knew?

Perpetually Unfinished

I came to realise over those first thirty days that in my endless wardrobe overhauls - which once seemed like a radical, final solution, but had over the years only increased in frequency, ruthlessness and desperation - and futile quest for a 'signature style', I was hunting for a lifestyle category I could just purchase and slot neatly into: Goth, geek, hippie, minimalist, 'quirky' girl... I wanted the safety of a set of rules, limits, guidelines for how I, personally, should dress, look, live, think. Rather than accepting that my personal taste is all over the spectrum, I wanted to be 2D, a fictional character, able to be summed up top-to-toe in a descriptive paragraph. Neat, tidy, unchanging, complete. 

Through this challenge, I've finally had to accept that there is no point at which I will be "finished". It's not the nature of human beings to evolve into a finished product. I will never be static. I will always be a work in progress - changeable, chaotic, paradoxical, a cacophony of tastes and desires and ideas and opinions, unchanging only in their utter inconsistency.

It is very freeing to accept this as fact.

I will never "finish" my wardrobe. There is not one true hairstyle out there waiting for me to discover it. I like new perfume too much to ever have a signature scent.

I am a chameleon, bowling cheerfully from this style to that, trying on new ideas and aspects and silhouettes all the time. And as I go, I find new gems to treasure like a magpie - a Goth rock band with a comedy name, a romance author I used to be too punk rock to dream of reading, a love of chunky knitwear, a perfume that smells like coffee and gunpowder. 

Nobody's tastes fit neatly into one style or subculture or definition. Everyone has "guilty pleasures" that don't fit with the image they have painstakingly created for themselves. But why? You are not a 2D creature. You can accept and like the things that don't fit, the things that are opposites.

Unable to soothe this burgeoning cognitive dissonance in the normal way, it slowly dawned on me that what I really wanted was to break out of the cycle of being a consumer. I wanted my purchases to bring enjoyment, not guilt and financial worry. And I wanted my wardrobe to consume less of my thoughts. I certainly never wanted to experience the trance of greed again.

The Month of Chilling the F Out

Throughout May that year I tried not to overthink what I was wearing, to be present in the moment, to notice how things made me feel. I tried to work through my wardrobe and wear everything - to see what fitted, what was comfortable, what I still liked. I tried to read for pleasure, not simply to tick books off my to-read list. And I tried to emphasise self-care, the idea being that feeling good about myself could come from something other than my looks, my clothing. I realised I barely knew how to pamper myself any more - I'd been so focused on my appearance for so long that sitting in the garden with a cup of tea (as opposed to painting my nails, applying a face mask, or any of the other beauty treatments marketed to women as "relaxing"... When did female leisure time come to revolve purely around making oneself more attractive?) was a revelation.

On Day 20, early June, I broke my browsing ban and immediately bought a pair of jeans that appeared in an ad on a blog I was reading. When they arrived they were too big and I returned them for a refund, feeling somewhat relieved.

Emotionally, I rollercoastered all month between empowered and deprived. I struggled to define myself as a person in any way other than how I looked and dressed, but I noticed that I was becoming more interested in the world around me - in nature, history, travel, folklore, philosophy - things that had fascinated me as a child but simply become of less importance than my appearance as I got older. My previous steady diet of women's magazines, fashion blogs and influencers' feeds had been limiting, designed to keep the focus firmly on the self and its flaws (which with enough time and money, you could fix, of course). 

I found myself chasing memories of my childhood, as though I could tap into pure, unadulterated me by going back far enough. I sorted through old photos and paid a visit to the village where I grew up, but there seemed a vast gulf between who I was and who I had become. I had been swallowed up by trying so hard to be anyone other than who I was, and the way back seemed impossible, unknowable. I wished I had not been so eager to be liked as a young woman, and had guarded that kernel of Essential Me better instead of trying to be rid of it, embarrassed by it. I may not have been any closer to defining who I was, but I did feel more fondly towards that person. 

By the end of the month I felt more purposeful and positive. I was enjoying keeping a journal, and I liked the sense of control over an aspect of my life, the realisation that I didn't have to be a slave to my impulses after all. The knowledge that I didn't LOSE anything by not buying something, that having or not having an item didn't change me as a person, had freed me from the spending trigger of trying to affirm my identity to myself, and not a moment too soon.

Finally, a quick update on where I'm at in my current shopping ban! I can report that after my lipstick blip I have stuck faithfully to the letter of the ban, bringing me to day 26 and going strong. I'm working through To Buy or Not To Buy by April Benson, and wow, it really is WORK. But it feels like I'm going to get out what I put in, so I'm doing all the exercises with gusto! I've also been reading Your Money or Your Life, and frankly I've never felt so pumped and excited reading a book about finances. I'm really looking forward to putting the steps into action and seeing if it's as life-changing as it sounds. 

Shopping Ban Rules, and My Overshopping History

 [Trigger warning: disordered eating]

Shopping Ban Rules:

  - No new clothes or accessories (unless something essential wears out beyond repair, or an unexpected black tie event happens)

  - No new magazines, books or e-books (normally I wouldn't ban book buying as the acquisition of knowledge is a great thing, but from where I sit, I can see my thirty unread books. I also have a local library and a handful of free community book swaps - as much as I like to support authors, I can really save some money here)

  - No new cosmetics - replacing used items only (confession! I have slipped up on this once so far during my current ban - a lipstick I'd had my eye on for ages was reduced to half price over Halloween and I just couldn't resist... Could do better!)

  - No housewares unless NEEDED, e.g. a replacement. 

  - Gifts are allowed

  - "Experiential" purchases, e.g. eating out, are allowed

  -      After much thought, I've decided on one tweak to my rules for this year. I recently read The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan, and in their no-shopping rules the authors suggest allowing purchases that "support arts, culture and the humanities", including artists, scholars and musicians. Normally this would include authors, but I can't afford to keep on buying more books. However, last year's ban breaks included an open studios visit where I met the lovely Hannah Willow, and a sculpture from Iris Compiet, so I've decided that supporting artists is important enough to me for me to make this an exception.

How I Got Here

I started my first serious attempt at a shopping ban in May 2019. My son was seven months old; I was newly engaged and knee-deep in wedding plans. On maternity leave but with my maternity allowance finished, I was also broke.

Let me note here that I am aware of my privileged position. My partner was working full time, I was able to take maternity leave and stay at home to raise our child. Some remaining vestige of common sense had stopped me from continuing my credit card application, so, unlike many people who become overshoppers, I had avoided running into debt.

Nonetheless, the first month of the ban was perhaps the most difficult. I wanted. I browsed. I longed. I scrolled. I chafed at the boundaries I had put on myself. My journal filled with lists - what I wanted to buy, what I could ask for for my birthday, what my wardrobe still needed to be "complete".

At this early juncture, my goals were still appearance-focused - I wanted this break from shopping to help me clarify my 'signature style', to allow my own true likes and dislikes to emerge from wherever they were buried. I also wanted to end the comparison game that was eroding my self-esteem - as far as I could tell, every woman, everywhere, was better dressed, happier in her skin, had better hair. Friends and strangers were equally scrutinised; I Facebook-stalked frenemies and teenage nemeses alike. 

I wanted to learn how to feel okay about just being me. But first I had to relearn who the heck I was.

I was not a born shopaholic. I was raised in a rural village in the nineties by a mother who still grew her own vegetables and sourced her cough remedies from the herb garden. Our TV had no channels; I grew up barefoot in the dirt on a diet of VHS eighties cartoons, outdoors in all weather, eating elderberries, nettles and beech nuts. My clothes were second-hand, my toys from boot sales and charity shops.

Introverted, bookish, with no understanding of fashions and fads, by the time I hit secondary school it was clear that I wasn't going to fit in. At fourteen I was bullied badly enough that my mum pulled me out of school. 

In my early teens I started crash dieting and obsessively counting calories. My relationship with food and weight came to define the better part of a decade as I starved, binged, purged, exercised until I fainted, took diet pills and laxatives, and generally made my own life a misery.

When I discovered Goth culture it became an obsession, an outlet - I started work at eighteen, and every paycheque went on Sisters of Mercy CDs, vampire novels, a slew of black clothing. Saving up my pocket money to buy a new outfit as a birthday treat morphed and grew into a collection of avidly maintained wish lists and lavish shopping sprees to Camden Market. 

I got a job in a charity shop, and the floor of my room soon disappeared under mountains of stuff. My books overflowed the shelves and then the desk. They were piled in every corner, collecting mug marks and dust. They were in crates under the bed, and when I moved house in my early twenties I found I had multiple copies of the same book - I had so many I couldn't keep track, let alone keep up with reading them all.

I had so many clothes it was almost impossible to get into my room. I had three wardrobes, all full to bursting, and eventually I started to colonize the spare room and the hallway as well. I never wore the same outfit twice, and was regularly up to forty minutes late for work because I wouldn't leave the house until my hair and make-up were perfect and I had taken a good enough 'outfit of the day' photo for my blog. 

In my mind I was living the dream, but I wasn't saving any money and I was utterly fixated on the way I looked, crafting the perfect Goth image. 

My blog became quite popular - it got me a regular slot writing for an American alternative magazine, gifts and freebies, a decent amount of ad revenue, an interview with a nice lady from the Guardian, and a few very nice people coming up and asking for photos when I was out and about at gigs. I posted daily, sometimes as many as four times a day, and maintained a Facebook page, Twitter, Lookbook (remember Lookbook?!), YouTube channel, Pinterest and Tumblr connected to the blog as well. 

When my fascination with all things Goth started to wane, I felt confused and guilty. So much time, effort and money had gone into building this very public persona. The Goth subculture, its emphasis on individuality and self-expression, had given me a place of belonging and something to focus on. For a good few years afterwards I stumbled from label to label (via self-loathing, a tidal wave of Tumblr and ill-advised white girl dreadlocks), trying to find a new niche where I fit. 

By the time I met my future fiance, aged twenty-five, four years after I eventually quit my career as a Goth blogger, I had decided that being as conventionally attractive as possible was the main goal (no sense of identity + long-term relationship break-up + WAY too much social media = bizarre headspace and a skewed perception of what "everyone else" is expecting of you) and to such an end I had amassed a VAST new wardrobe, an array of cosmetic products to doctor every flaw, and appointments - bookings made, deposits paid - for a raft of varyingly intrusive cosmetic procedures (none of which I went through with, much to my relief now). 

I considered myself recovered from my disordered eating, but with hindsight I can see that my confidence had been damaged by the way I'd treated and talked to myself during those years, some of the situations I'd stayed in beyond all reason, and by the unrealistic standards I'd been setting. (I'm happy to say that this is much improved by now, particularly over the past couple of years when I have drastically cut myself some slack with a great deal of support from my partner.)

Pregnancy and motherhood came as a further shock to my self-image. Make-up and thoughtful choices of outfit fell by the wayside. I was curvier than I had ever been, with new stretchmarks and unrecognizable boobs. New glasses, hormonal acne and an awkwardly grown out bob haircut meant that I barely knew the person in the mirror. Most of my clothes didn't fit any more.

So I turned to the only solution I knew. I went shopping. By January 2019 I was spending hundreds of pounds on my tablet most nights while feeding the baby. I'd tried to stop, or at least to slow down, but it wasn't until I was almost out of money that I managed to apply the brakes. I didn't get a buzz from shopping any more, just a sense of panic, guilt and anxiety, and I knew it was time to (try to) go cold turkey.

It's still a work in progress (see my confession re: lipstick, above), but now at least I am solvent. I had to leave all gadgets outside the bedroom for the first few months, but the improvements are vast. I just want to see if I can continue to do better - to break once and for all my association between spending money, and feeling a sense of identity, of self-worth. 

I am not what I buy.

Why I'm Quitting Shopping

My name is Katrina (actually that's my middle name, I'm shy, but close enough), I'm 29, and I am currently twelve days into my second attempt at a year-long shopping ban.

On this blog I hope to document my triumphs, tips and failures, and hold myself accountable as I attempt to quit shopping, live a greener life, and sidestep the mindless consumerism that, to be honest, has dominated my life for way too long.

Why a shopping ban?

The day my fiance and I went to give notice of our intent to marry, I had to tell him that I'd spent the maternity allowance my employer had paid me over the last ten months whilst I was at home with our baby boy. That was the money that was supposed to give us a buffer, to help us through the next couple of years until the little man started nursery and I could go back to work part time.

Instead, I had a wardrobe bursting at the seams with clothes, hundreds of perfume samples, thousands of unread books and magazines... There were charges on my bank statement that I couldn't identify, but I knew they weren't fraudulent. I'd just shopped so much that I'd forgotten what I'd bought. Even my dad, visiting, commented on the frequency of the deliveries turning up with more, more, more. Checking my bank balance felt like staring down the barrel of a loaded weapon. 

Something had to give.

Salvation was at hand in the form of holiday pay which would arrive in my account in three months' time. It wouldn't make up for the savings I had blown, but it would stabilise my finances and give us a chance to find our feet. But, I had to stop shopping.

No one could ever accuse me of being a fashionista. As a child I constantly wore socks with my sandals, and probably still would if my mother hadn't eventually put her foot down. I wear jeans and trainers pretty much every day, and the best word you could use to describe my outerwear  collection is 'sensible'. And yet the greatest wear and tear on my wallet was clothes. My preoccupation with trying to improve the way I looked was costing me a fortune. 

Since my early teens I had developed a tendency to try to buy myself a sense of identity. Hours, days, weeks of my life vanished on Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, the endless scroll of "inspiration" , seeking the photo or quote or One True Garment that would somehow express perfectly every nuance of my essence, encapsulate everything I wanted strangers to know about me. I bounced from subculture to subculture, and gradually my own taste was lost in the morass, subsumed by a tide of images, my personality crowdsourced. 

I had gone from a carefree child cheerfully wearing lurid flower prints and bobbly hand-knitted cardigans to an anxious adult paralysed in Primark. Facing a rack of clothes in what was supposed to be (yet another) last-ditch wardrobe overhaul, in which I cleared out a large chunk of the clothes I had and replaced them, thereby creating a New Me who would somehow have it together, I realised that I didn't know which of the selection of T-shirts before me I actually liked. 

My childhood had by and large been so unspoilt and simple; reading, writing, drawing, making things for my own pleasure and at my own pace. I was hoping to recapture this freedom of mind and abundance of spirit, rather than spending every waking moment fixated on things whose only true value to me was the fact that I didn't already own them.

Emotionally, I was exhausted from comparing myself to every woman I saw, both online and IRL. I had style mood boards coming out of my ears, but what looked good in a Milan street style photo from The Sartorialist and what seemed reasonable to wear for a dash round Aldi when the baby had a tummy bug just didn't gel.

I hated the way I looked. I hated that I could no longer trust myself with money. I wasn't raised to be a spendthrift - quite the opposite! I hated that I didn't know who I was any more, and now that the money was quite simply gone - wasted - I had to accept that I could never solve this identity crisis by throwing more cash at it.

Pressing Pause

The humble shopping ban has seen an unlikely surge in popularity in recent years, in various guises such as cosmetics obsessives trying to use up ('pan') their existing hoards of products before they go off, to a simple thirty-day ban on clothes purchases to save a little money or enable a wardrobe edit, to the more seriously arduous no-spend year a la Michelle McGagh, who cycled her jeans to smithereens on a spending-free holiday and endured twelve brave months of tap water in the pub (or taking it to the next level altogether, writer Mark Boyle, who gave up using money entirely for one year, putting my comparatively simple challenge firmly in the shade. I may have found it a struggle to avoid the open doors and budget temptations of TK Maxx, but I didn't brew my own tea from foraged herbs or build a compost toilet).

With the rise of minimalism and Marie Kondo on the one hand, and an increased awareness of the threat of man-made climate change, caused in no small part by overproduction of consumer goods, on the other, the modern-day shopper is becoming more aware of the power of our money to create change, both within ourselves and the world at large. 

A shopping ban is a way to press pause, to take stock of and appreciate all that we already have. During the last few years, I had several times attempted short shopping bans, and had discovered, to my squirming discomfort, that I couldn't last a week. I'd discovered Cait Flanders, who completed a two year shopping ban, and my reaction was rage - I closed the tab, put her out of my mind, and chose not to investigate the shocking surge of anger I had felt.

But the concept of a shopping ban had struck a chord, and now I realised I had no other options left. At first I didn't tell anyone what I was doing, but I started keeping a daily journal. Partly to keep myself accountable, partly so I could investigate what came up for me during this challenge, and partly so I could try to figure out how, exactly, I got here.

And I embarked on a quest not to shop for one whole year.

A year and a half later, I can say, I didn't succeed.

However, I learned a lot about myself and about the relentless consumer society we live in, and I'm hoping to put those lessons into practice as I take on year two. 

Wish me luck!