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!