The Year of Being Myself

Welcome back! I hope you had a lovely Christmas and ate your body weight in roast potatoes. So this is 2021... After the Shitshow Formerly Known As 2020, I'll admit I'm reluctant to get too excited about what might be in store. 

However, this year, I've decided to change tactics a little with my shopping ban. I'd basically done a Mrs. Frugalwoods and stopped doing anything that cost money (make-up, nail varnish, professional haircuts), generally citing environmental worries. I did eventually realise that one person not dyeing their hair was not going to change the world, and actually I am allowed to look nice and enjoy myself a bit. Instead of being a bit of a martyr.

I had hoped that, like Mrs F., cutting back my beauty routines would help me feel more confident and comfortable in my skin, and in some ways it has - I have come to like my own face without make-up, for example. But frankly I'd still like a hairstyle that suits me, and to paint my nails without feeling as if I'm being frivolous (yes, I have beaten myself up over some weird things during the last year or so).

So in the last weeks of December I bought a fair amount of stuff - some pretty nail varnishes, sandals made from recycled sailboat rope (I didn't have any attractive summer shoes, only a single pair of Very Practical ones), tartan trousers from London brand Love Too True to replace my old, beloved pair that sadly ripped up the bum cheek some years ago, a couple of Spirited Away t-shirts (bless Truffle Shuffle for providing ethically made nerdery) and some nice PJs so I can stop wearing my old, holey leggings to bed. And quite a lot of mochi, because, hooray food. I'm not sure when being slightly more environmentally conscious tipped over in my head into complete self-denial, sackcloth and ashes, but I'm definitely ready to move on from that now and find a balance between frugality, sustainability and actually being myself. Which leads me to the meat of this post.

Style Guides and Self-Expression

Recently, I read a book called The Curated Closet. I'd been watching a makeover show called Misfits Salon, which I would have loved as a teen. Unlike Snog, Marry, Avoid, which took outlandish dressers and toned their looks down (with a good helping of snark), Misfits Salon takes people who feel that for whatever reason their wardrobes aren't adequately expressing their personality, and turns up the dial. After happy-crying my way through a whole season, I leaped on Pinterest, seeking new ways I could express myself with fashion.

But I find Pinterest absolutely horrible to use - unless you know the exact words to describe what you're looking for it's hard to find anything useful, and I always seem to end up sucked into an oddly depressing vortex of girls much younger than me wearing Topshop's latest (or whoever is producing jeans with no thighs this season), accessorised with improbable waists and huge lips. And then I realise I've lost four hours.

So I turned to The Curated Closet. Early on in the shopping ban, I got rid of all my style guides and similar books, and found it a relief to no longer worry about someone else's arbitrary rules and opinions, so I approached the book with more than a little trepidation. 

If you know me, you might be surprised to hear that I have read and collected books about style and fashion. Because my current personal style is perhaps best described as 'practical middle aged mum and angry nineties kid go shopping, drunk, in Camden Market', I think the general assumption is that I don't care much. But I actually love clothes! I love to see how people, particularly women, choose to present themselves - not in a "Fashion Week street style" sense, but everyday people. Put me somewhere like Waterloo Station and I will happily sit and look at people's outfits for hours.

Yet I couldn't get on with The Curated Closet. I found myself thinking, this makes it all seem like such hard work. So much effort to put in, just for the negligible reward of feeling well-dressed. My current approach to the matter of dressing myself is to open my wardrobe, take out some clothes that coordinate in some vague way (or clash on purpose. Love me some revolting print mixes and colour combos) and put them on. If I'm given an item that I wouldn't define as being 'my style', I like to try it on anyway and see if I can make it work. 

Re-Learning How To Dress For Myself

After I'd mentioned on this blog once or twice that I have the occasional wobble about being the "worst dressed friend" or similar, I received such a sweet text from a dear friend, who has known me since nursery (!). She said, "Going back decades, I've always loved your sense of style and general randomosity of your clothes! We all get the little voice in the head telling us all the bad stuff, but tell your one that makes you worry about being the worst dressed where to go."

This gave me such a lift, and reminded me of the first clothing purchase I saved up for and bought myself - a pair of rainbow striped corduroy flares! I thought they were just the most beautiful, joyful things ever, and I loved them to pieces. No, they weren't tasteful, or "cool", or even terribly flattering, but they make me smile even now when I think about them. 

I am often teased by loved ones for some of my more appalling clothes purchases or combinations. This, I do not mind. I'm not totally oblivious - I know I'm prone to looking like I ran through a charity shop covered in glue. No, I'm not "well-dressed", or cool (good taste and coolness both being tedious and arbitrary ideas based on shifting goalposts and elitism, e.g. for there to be an in-crowd, there by definition has to be an out-crowd - oh, hello again high school), but I am warm when it's cold, dry when it's raining, my feet don't hurt, and I can handle getting muddy with my two-year-old. And I didn't have to spend precious life hours making a moodboard, a lifestyle pie chart or a style profile. Which is exactly what I want from my wardrobe.

Except for one tiny problem, which is this: when I look in the mirror lately, I don't like what I see. I don't feel like myself. 

After some thought, I realised that for the last two years, I've really thought only of my wardrobe in terms of quantity, cost, and wastage. I wear clothes I don't like, or that are physically uncomfortable, in order to get use out of them. I've been trying to save the world single-handedly by never throwing anything away, horrified by the thought of being wasteful. After a couple of ill-fated, badly-managed clearouts in the last couple of years, I have a lot of clothes that I wouldn't have chosen for myself but which I wear anyway. At the expense of chunks of self-esteem, on occasion.

So this year, I want to relearn how to enjoy clothes and dress for myself again. This is not carte blanche for a big shopping spree! As with books, I've discovered that there is a point for me where enough is enough - the unread pile becomes an obligation rather than a pleasure. Same with clothes - more choice equals more stress. Enjoying clothes is more about feeling right in what I have, not forever craving more and more. However, I do want to filter out the items that don't fit or that I feel frumpy, less-than-confident or downright godawful in. I feel like I'm kind of chiselling my true self out of a big block of stuff that isn't "me" any more, it's just obscuring the view.

My goal this year is to really tune in to my gut feelings, as they are the only yardstick I have - and stop feeling guilty for wanting to enjoy clothes and have some fun with the way I look. Embrace the part of me that says rainbow trousers are a good idea (she's still in there, which is why I own purple tie dye dungarees). This will also give me the tools to make better choices when I do make purchases - I certainly don't want thoughts of stuff and money to be always at the forefront of my mind, but that has been an unfortunate but necessary side effect of the ban. Going forward, I want to be able to make decisions based on joy, from a place of contentment and confidence. No more scarcity mindset - or guilt. And I can't wait!

January Accountability

I must be honest, I considered not doing a shopping ban at all this year. It frustrates me that I've not yet managed to complete my goal of 365 days without an unnecessary purchase, but I don't like the way my brain turned 'not buying things I don't need' into 'wanting to wear clothes I actually like is consumerist'. So after my last post, I stopped my day count and waited until the new year to decide what I was going to do (hence those guilt-free December purchases). My finances are currently pretty stable, so I don't have to pinch pennies quite as much as I have been, but I don't want to end up right back where I started either!

Firstly, I want to focus less on the not-shopping and more on what comes after - e.g , if I'm not shopping, thinking about shopping, or planning my next purchase, where am I going to put all that creative energy? Shopping, for me, has definitely been about expressing myself, via clothing, home decor, and other trinkets, so as well as learning to do that without a constant influx of the new, I also want to put the focus back on what I can produce instead of what I can consume. I don't know in what way yet, I just know that I don't want my life to be forever revolving around stuff, whether buying it or not buying it. I want a creative project to tackle, and possibly a class or a course of some kind. The most inspiring book I read in 2020 was The Enchanted Life by Sharon Blackie, and it reminded me what a big part creativity used to play in my life, before Facebook and email and 24/7 online shopping filled up all the empty spaces.

I've also decided to make this a "low-buy" rather than a no-shop year. I want to stop overshopping, but I do want to be able to purchase things relevant to my interests, or that otherwise bring value to my life, without it being a huge deal, or a source of guilt and stress. And I want to get out of the deprive-splurge cycle I seem to have ended up in. So I'm aiming for a monthly "allowed" purchase - we'll see how that goes.