The 'Mrs Baggins' Style Challenge

As you'll know from last week's post, I was beginning to think of style as a kind of scam to encourage us to feel dissatisfied with our selves and our clothes. You might think that this feeling would lead to a sense of liberation, but instead I found myself a little despondent: "You mean, this is it? Get used to feeling slightly uncomfortable in my skin, all the time, forever? I never get to changing-room-movie-montage my way out of this?" 

Then, in a rather timely manner I received a newsletter from Jill Chivers at Shop Your Wardrobe which contained a link to this post, which contains references to lots of studies about how the way we dress can affect our mood, confidence and self-image. I couldn't help but think back to how I'd felt all day in my jeans, which were just slightly too short to look right with my shoes. I'd wanted to work on accepting myself, but was I just stifling myself instead? Why didn't I just change the damn shoes?

This has been a year of many challenges, from several months of no-buy to a big rewilding plan, walking across hot coals and wearing everything in my 100+ item wardrobe. So I started to think, perhaps it was time to set myself some more.

I recently came across a piece of wisdom that suggests we give ourselves three years to work towards a chosen goal. At the end of that time, we have either succeeded, made progress, or perhaps learned that it's time to peacefully let go. But I've been working on this no-buy for three years, and to be honest I didn't fancy spending another three obsessing over the contents of my wardrobe.

So I decided, okay. Three months. For three months, I would lean into this whole style thing. I would do my best to learn whatever lessons it had to teach. I would shop my wardrobe. I would not leave the house in an outfit I did not like. I would take copious notes on how I felt and how it affected me. However, I would not shop. I would either make outfits with my own clothes or borrow from friends. Adding new clothes seemed like a thing that would only compound my state of identity crisis and confusion. 

At first I thought I should get some style guides and try to enact their advice, perhaps challenge myself with a different book for each month, but then I wondered if maybe I was looking at the whole thing wrong. The point wasn't to become stylish, it was to find my style. I feel fairly certain that my style is not to be found in someone else's list of essential basics or defined by which fruit or vegetable I most resemble. So I decided to start really, really simple, by just putting together outfits that I actually like when I get dressed in the mornings.

I know, right, it's hardly revolutionary. Usually when we are encouraged to discover our style, the suggestion is that style is 'out there somewhere', possibly still hanging on the rail in H&M, waiting for us to go and catch it in our fashion-y net. This is the kind of talk that makes me wary, makes me start thinking fashion is a con game. Comparatively, consider the wisdom of Leena Norms: 

 "When it comes to showing who you are through your clothes, I think that isn't a misguided idea, but if clothes are supposed to speak about who we are, surely where they came from is as important as, like... what colour they are. How frequently I buy them is as important as how 'me' they are, whatever that means. I also think that re-wearing clothes makes them more you. Like, you really settle in to your style when you re-wear stuff you really, really love, and people start knowing you for that. So rather than always having to reinvent the wheel and walk into New Look and be like 'Right, I've got to find an item that's 'me',' the secret might actually be already be at home in your wardrobe into looking like yourself."

I'd already learned from wearing my wardrobe that I have those things because I like them. So it's kind of ironic that I end up feeling bad when I wear them. Especially when I quite possibly have the power to... not.

Do you know what made me think twice about buying a bunch of style guides to slavishly follow their advice? (I recently flicked through one that suggested leather leggings are a must-have wardrobe staple... all I will say is, to each their own, but I cannot express how much I do not wish to wear a pair of leather leggings in this lifetime.) I was scrolling on Pinterest, because although I know it's a total waste of time it sometimes feels like I'm doing something productive and if I can just find the right image it will magically solve all my fashion conundrums forever, and I found myself looking at a picture of Emma Orbach.

I deeply admire Emma Orbach. She lives in a self-built hobbit house on the slopes of a mountain in Pembrokeshire, off the grid, where she lives off the land, tends horses and plays the harp. And has done, without running water or electricity, for over twenty years.

In this photograph, Emma Orbach was wearing a crystal pendant necklace and a stripy v-neck jumper. And I thought, for heaven's sake, this woman lives in a mud hut in the middle of nowhere, presumably without a mirror, milking goats and communing with her spirit guides, she obviously knows there are WAY more important things than her appearance, and she can still be bothered to put on a nice necklace that she likes. So why the hell can't I?

I wanted to wear my equivalent of Emma Orbach's necklace. Nice things, that I like, in a combination that I enjoy. 

So I'm calling it The Mrs Baggins Style Challenge. I give myself three months to see if a little bit of style really can change my life, or even just my mood. I'll keep you posted.

This week, this blog is also two years old! Does it feel like two years to you?!

I Still Feel Like a Shopping Addict: My No-Buy August

After the success of my No-Buy July, I decided to carry on and do a No-Buy August. Although I'd realised at the end of July that my determination not to spend can sometimes be very punitive, which I think is a part of why I sometimes have these breakout shopping binges, so I decided to try to take a slightly more relaxed approach with my trip to St David's, where some of my favourite sustainable fashion shops are - I only get to go there once a year, I know I'm not going to go crazy and buy everything in the store, so I would let myself have a browse and maybe make a purchase.

I was kind of planning in general to offer myself this more relaxed approach going forward. Sure, "I went a year without shopping," sounds cool and would be a great thing to have achieved, but the actual end goal I'm hoping for is a simplified life where I don't spend so much time and energy on consumerism, money and stuff. I don't think that the way to get to that place is by heaping guilt on myself all the time. Yes, I can benefit from having some boundaries and self-discipline around my spending, which is why I'm still aiming for a no-buy (otherwise I tend to just create more and more loopholes for myself and don't get to learn what I need to learn), but if my accomplishment in the end is 'just' a low-buy, then I'm still improving and making changes.

Sometimes I feel frustrated that I go backwards and forwards so much on what I want to buy, how I want to dress and so forth - I can only imagine that it's just as frustrating for you to follow along! But I do try to be honest and accountable on this blog, and at least if there's another me out there who feels just as tangled up and confused by their shopping and spending habits, you can see that you're not the only one struggling to find a balance or sometimes making less-than-ideal decisions whilst you try to help yourself out of the rut. One thing I've really enjoyed since day one on this blog is being able to pull together all the things I've learned and all the resources that have helped and inspired me and kind of compile them in one place for anyone else who is on a similar path, hence the links I've started adding to the bottom of many of my newer posts.

However, the most frustrating thing of all is that after three years of trying to tackle this problem, I'm still overspending in my problem categories and - worse - I still feel like a shopping addict, just one who's come back a little bit from the brink of debt and financial collapse. 

I still have a lot of weird issues around my style, too. I think that with all the big changes in my life over the last few years and the difficult decade I had before that, I've really lost touch with my sense of identity and also my confidence. My fixation on 'fixing' my problems with style and shopping is just a symptom of that - it's the outside shell of the issue, the visible thing that I can take in hand and work on. It still feels to me as though I have to solve these issues before I can move on (to what, I don't know yet!). I've spent the last couple of years trying to override, ignore or suppress that feeling, which hasn't worked. 

So how did my attempt at a no-buy August pan out?

Week One

I found that I'm very strongly influenced by the content that I consume, more so than I realised. I spent a couple of days watching the same YouTubers I've been watching a lot lately (Gittemary, Christina Mychas, Malama Life), and found myself thinking that perhaps I could sell some of my more 'out there' stuff as I don't really wear it or know how to style it these days. Then a couple of days later I was reading the Voice of Nature blog and found myself wanting more flowy faerie clothes. This isn't really something I can avoid - even if I came offline, I suspect that TV, movies, books and even people around me are still exerting some kind of influence - so I think it's something I just need to be aware of, and if I've been consuming content a lot perhaps just assume that my thoughts are not entirely my own. Which sounds a little sinister when put like that. I have always been very susceptible to advertising so this doesn't particularly surprise me, it's just useful to keep in mind.

I was also able to use this susceptibility to my advantage by tweaking my media consumption to include more from people with a strong anticonsumerist perspective (I like ecofriend.Lia) and guided meditations, and otherwise cut back on the time I spend just browsing online. I found this really helped me to feel calmer, as well as more grateful and appreciative for all the things I already own.

Week Two

This was the week of our annual family holiday to Wales. There's nothing like quiet time in the company of the sea and the sky to put things in perspective. The heat was blistering and money tight, so most of our days were spent on the beach, shifting focus between the vast blue horizon and the minutiae of tiny starfish clinging to the rocks at low tide. 

The holiday was not without its, um, shopaholic moments - I asked Dai to drive me back into St David's after our initial visit so that I could buy an item of clothing I'd spotted, only to discover, once I managed to persuade him, that the item was out of stock in my size. I also had a bit of a wobble when my brother-in-law arrived with his beautiful, glamorous girlfriend. 

I dislike this comparison tendency that I still have. It's certainly not as pronounced or as constant as it used to be, but I've noticed that as I shop less I fixate less on comparing what I am wearing, which at least I could change, and instead compare things I can't particularly control, like my hair texture, my shape or my skin. This is pretty unhelpful and obviously something I still need to work on. 

Luckily, it turned out that a week of free thalassotherapy was exactly what the doctor ordered. I found that the confidence I gained after my firewalk continued to expand my comfort zone, as we adventured around the coast by kayak and stand-up paddleboard. I don't think I would have been brave enough to try these new things even a year ago, let alone dash into the sea in T-shirt and knickers as I did one evening when I was too sunburned to get my wetsuit on but still really, really wanted a swim.

I always find the Pembrokeshire trip to be an opportunity to reset, to reconsider my responsibilities, how I approach them, and what I can let go of. It also helps me, each and every time, to reconnect with my deep and abiding love for our beautiful planet, and to remember to see the world through my little one's eyes. 

Our eventual plan is to move to the Welsh coast - even the Spud asks regularly, "Mummy, me go sea now?" - and I am reminded anew to make this a priority when it comes to setting my budgets.

Week Three

The post-holiday blues hit hard, and this week was mostly bleugh. Still, I felt buoyed by having come this far without falling off the wagon. With no firewalks or sea swims making themselves immediately available, I shifted my focus back onto my study of Druidry, as I had been reminded how that particular way of connecting with nature and embracing enchantment in the everyday had thoroughly enriched my life. 

At this point I was seven weeks in to this iteration of the no-buy challenge, and I was starting to really experience the benefits. I felt steadier and more secure in myself, less subject to being caught up in online trends, and at peace and comfortable with the contents of my wardrobe. I'd stopped looking for the next thing I might purchase.

Week Four

Much to my surprise, I still hadn't really had any urges to break the ban. I had occasional dips in mood, but I found I could remedy these with any one of hundreds of activities available to me close to my home or via the magic of the internet: walking, cooking, visiting the library, journaling, guided meditations, qigong, breathwork, self-massage, wild swimming, even the odd bit of kundalini chanting when Dai wasn't around to hear me. I got a bit gung-ho about wellness and self-help and found myself charging into cold showers and smoothing my magnetic field. From the outside it possibly looked a bit nuts, and long-term I suspect the pick-and-mix approach could just become another form of consumerism, but it was fun, free and exciting. I was learning lots of new things, and new coping mechanisms for everyday stresses, as well as getting to know myself a bit better (on more levels than one. I was intrigued to find out that apparently the Door to Life resides in the lower back!).

At the end of the month, I felt much calmer and less anxious about shopping in general. My knuckles weren't white any more, and I could see myself continuing in this vein for a while longer. I could also, just about, conceive of a future where the occasional purchase was a joyful thing, neither a big deal nor an all-consuming urge.

Recent inspirations:

How to make good shopping decisions even though you have so many options and lots of feelings

Consumerism is keeping you broke! Here's how

Alternative Ethical/Sustainable Slow Fashion Brands Part One

I Bought No Clothes For Two Years - Here's What I Learnt

I'm going to be away for a couple of weeks - normal service will resume when I get back.

My No-Buy July: A Belated Write-Up

July, it seemed, was a good month for those of us trying to buy less stuff. Frugalwoods was running the Uber Frugal Month (I've signed up for this so many times that I've memorised the emails, yet I still don't invest, and I haven't yet trusted myself with a credit card. Maybe next year. Why do I feel like there's this whole arena of adulthood associated with these kinds of financial decisions that I somehow don't feel ready for yet?). I also discovered a YouTuber, Christina Mychas, who was running a No-Buy July support group by email, and also has a Facebook group, Low Buy Beauties.

In July, our annual trip to Pembrokeshire was so close that I could almost smell the sea, and we were also starting to get excited about our trip to Shetland in October. Dai booked the overnight ferry at the beginning of July, and I was starting to realise, with considerable discomfort, that a 'big' holiday (we originally booked it to fall between my 30th birthday and Dai's 40th, but had to push it back a year due to covid uncertainties) would be something we could do far more regularly if I stopped spending so much money on other things.

My finances weren't looking great following my trip to Brighton with Alice. I hadn't emptied my piggy bank, but as a carer I'm on a low income, and it takes a while for the coffers to refill. I wasn't intending to spend a lot on either holiday, but it did remind me that it was time to have a look at how I was doing with my budgets.

Well, it wasn't good. When I added up the columns of numbers in the back of my journal, I learned that, seven months into the year, I was already over the budgets I'd set myself for cosmetics, books, and clothes. Clothing was the worst category - I'd nearly spent twice my annual budget, which meant, terrifyingly, that in seven months I'd nearly spent the same amount I spent throughout the whole of 2021. Not. Good. At all.

It was time for a bit of triage. I was on the waiting list for a commission from a slow fashion artisan I'd been admiring online for some time, and I contacted her to say I couldn't afford the piece right now, and would it be all right for me to get in touch in a few more months and go back on the bottom of the waiting list then. She was amazingly nice about it, and actually said that when I get back in touch I won't have to wait again, which was so kind. I also had a tattoo appointment booked in early September for a new large design on my left arm, but I knew I couldn't justify another three-figure spend, so I contacted my tattooist and cancelled the appointment. I did not enjoy doing these things, but I also would not have enjoyed finishing up the year with no cash cushion left in my account. The modern wisdom is 'treat yo'self', but without limits my spending was spiralling out of my control. Better to wait until I could afford these things without risk of crippling myself financially.

I was also still plugging away with Flylady, and our small house was looking so much better. Partly because it was cleaner (!), but also because we didn't have so much stuff squeezed where it didn't really fit. But then, reading back through my journal, I was quite alarmed to discover that apparently I had also had a 'big declutter' back in February. By July, I couldn't see the difference or remember a single thing I had gotten rid of only a few months ago, which freaked me out a bit! I took a quick inventory of my wardrobe, and was interested to find that my 63 t-shirts (as inventoried in 2019) had been reduced to a much more storage-space-friendly 25, yet even when I wracked my brain I could only think of five or six I had given to friends or donated. Where did the other 30-odd come from, and where did they go?!

This experience really confirmed to me that I am still not quite the mindful shopper I had convinced myself I was. I could do with being a lot stricter on myself when it comes to spending, and I think I'm doing the right thing by trying to get the most out of the items that I have so I don't constantly feel like I have to be seeking something more. It's a bit worrisome that so many pieces are still kind of just passing through - I do shop mainly second-hand nowadays, and I get a lot given to me from friends' clearouts, but if I don't want to be decluttering eternally I need to be MUCH more ruthless about what I bring into the house.

I decided to follow Mint Notion's Shop Your Closet challenge throughout July. It would challenge my ingrained consumer mindset - I'd noticed that when I picture myself doing this or that in the future, I imagine a fantasy wardrobe for myself and start planning what to buy, rather than figuring out appropriate outfits from the abundance I have already!

Week One

An easy week, shopping-wise. No temptations, no slips, no mistakes. I noticed that my usage of Instagram and Pinterest fell dramatically throughout the course of the week, which made me wonder how much the 'inspiration' I'm seeking actually translates to 'the next thing to buy'. 

This was also the week I had the brainwave of rearranging my clothes instead of decluttering any further. My winter gear was put away in under bed storage, and I moved my socks and bras from a drawer in my wardrobe into a small crate that sits in the wardrobe itself. Then I had enough room to vanquish the last of those plastic crates that have been living scattered around our bedroom. It's a great feeling and the room feels and looks so much better.

(Actually there are still a couple of boxes on my side of the bedroom. Those are my 'maybe' boxes, where I'm keeping those last few pieces that I haven't decided whether or not to let go of. Traditional wisdom holds that you should seal your maybe boxes and put them away for a few months, after which time you can declutter them guilt-free, but after reminding myself that I'm an aspiring environmentalist, not an aspiring minimalist, first and foremost, I've left the boxes open so that I can mix my maybe items into my outfits. Some of those items will still have to go - they just don't fit and aren't comfortable. Others might have ended up in the boxes simply because I was desperate to get rid of something, anything, to edge closer to the mythical capsule wardrobe of my fantasy self, and they might deserve another chance.)

I watched a lot more YouTube than usual during this week - I found that it kept me feeling positive about the challenge to hear from others who were doing/are doing a no-buy - it reminded me that I'm doing this to have more money for other things; that I'm not making a sacrifice, just changing my priorities. (I've linked some of my favourite videos at the bottom of this post, as well as some articles that kept me fired up!)

Week Two

Now that things were tidy and manageable I found myself quite naturally focusing on things other than my wardrobe. I'd been enjoying the Shop Your Closet challenge as it has encouraged me to try new combinations and wear those items that didn't see the light of day as much, but I now found myself deviating from the suggested outfits as I had so many ideas for combinations I wanted to try. But after getting dressed in the mornings, I noticed that I wasn't really thinking at all about clothes.

Instead I was cooking more and making some of our household staples from scratch (armed with The Planet-Friendly Kitchen by Karen Edwards). It was too hot to go out or do anything very active, but I made some headway into my To Be Read pile. I made some cash selling a few of my unwanted things through Facebook Marketplace, and I started getting up early to beat the heat so that I could start again with my yoga practice - I have an annoying tendency to stick with it just long enough to notice my strength and flexibility increasing, then slack off long enough to stiffen up again. Much like I do with shopping bans, actually! But not this time, I hope.

What I do with my time when I'm not on a shopping ban baffles me. Surely I can't just be spending hours a day browsing? I thought I'd broken that habit. And yet I suddenly seemed to have a lot more opportunity to do the things I was always too busy for. Odd!

Week Three

I really wasn't sure if I wanted to admit to this on the internet, but I had a horrible moment where I found myself crying behind my sunglasses on a busy high street because I felt horrendously self-conscious and ugly in my summer clothes. In hindsight I think the book I'd been reading that weekend had been a bit triggering for those faint eating disordered thoughts that sometimes still crop up in the back of my brain, and I was feeling a bit vulnerable. I just couldn't think of how to help myself past these painful feelings without either shopping or dieting, but I knew that neither would be helpful, especially not as a knee-jerk response.

I did eventually decide that I probably needed a bit of indulgence and self-care time, a morning routine that wasn't a quick wash-and-go, maybe even a bit of lipstick and a pair of high heels. I've mentioned before that I keep trying to do without 'frivolous style and beauty stuff' in the name of, I dunno, dedicating myself to being a more serious eco warrior (or something like that), and it has helped to see that my favourite sustainability influencers clearly love clothes and make-up and generally looking nice. This overload of crappy feelings really brought home to me that I actually need to carve out that time in my morning routine to let myself feel good about myself. 

I'm wary of coming to depend on make-up to feel acceptable like I did when I was younger, so I'm going to try not to overdo it but instead to find a balance. 

Week Four

Speaking of balance, I know that I've already spent too much in my 'problem' categories this year, so going forward I really don't want to spend too much more in 2022. But this week I started to have some some wobbles about what my next steps are going to be. Realistically, I don't know if a year without shopping is ever going to be a thing for me, and sometimes I wonder if that's even a sensible thing to aim for - this blog post about choosing low-buy over no-buy came into my orbit this week, and the writer makes a good case. 

Although I feel like 'giving myself a gift' every week might be a bit excessive and would definitely push those big holidays further out of reach, I can certainly see that, say, a monthly treat like a new face mask or a book or whatever could actually be really uplifting. But when I tried a low-buy year before, it went horribly wrong! Maybe now that I'm not shopping online so much, I could do it? Being able to still shop somewhat would also mean I could do some thrifting, which I have been keen to do more since I started watching Gittemary's channel.

I have actually started planning another trip with Alice for a few months' time - we're going to take the train to London in January or February, and we're planning to visit the flagship Waterstones bookstore in Piccadilly and browse the shops in Soho, as well as a bit of sightseeing. There's approximately a 0% chance that I will come home empty-handed after noodling around Beyond Retro, and I'm trying to channel my inner Gittemary and not feel guilty as long as the shopping is sustainable and doesn't bust my budget. The thing is that I still kind of want to be this hardline frugal mindful simplicity guru who doesn't care about style, doesn't go nuts for new zero waste and vegan skin care products, doesn't adore clothes, doesn't enjoy shopping as an activity, doesn't like going to the spa - but I'm not that person and I do love all of those things. I feel like it undermines my anticonsumerist Druid credibility, but I can't change myself - I have tried!

I can't decide if my end goal is to quit shopping altogether (except replacement items and the things I need to live!) or just to give it less overall room in my life, an occasional enjoyable activity rather than a complete obsession. People who've done a no-buy year tend to rave about it as life-changing, and I kind of want some of that! But I also want to not always be punishing myself...

This post is getting super long, but at the very tail end of July I went with Dai and the Spud to Valhalla Viking Festival, which I'll talk a bit more about in another post for the sake of brevity. But suffice to say I completed my no-buy successfully despite delicious temptations abounding. It was helpful to remind myself that there will always be something else to want, and I won't actually miss or regret the items I don't buy.

Inspiration:

Quit Fast Fashion in Your Twenties (applicable for any age, and funny as well as lots of smart advice on how to generally shop better!)

I stopped buying clothes and found my personal style

Zero Waste Without Minimalism? 

Un-Fashioning the Future

How I Overcame My Shopping Addiction

Rewilding in 2022: 2nd Progress Report - Touching the Wild

This season, I went vegetarian. I'd been kicking the idea around for a while, and my close friend Alice stopped eating meat after working in packing for an online food shop over Christmas and being slightly freaked out by the vast scale of naked, shrink-wrapped poultry she was faced with night after night. I'd tried to cut down my meat for a while, but found that, in a bid to prove to Dai that I wasn't 'depriving myself', the consequence was that I actually ended up eating more meat.

Then I took the Spud to visit some farm animals. The Spud has this real thing about sheep, and after a morning of watching him cuddle the lambs and brush their soft baby fleeces and feed them a milk bottle... Well, I was ruined for the Sunday roast, that was for sure. It's not been an easy adjustment in a mixed household where we generally all eat together, but I just can't eat meat any more, so we'll have to get to grips with it.

It could be argued that a vegetarian diet doesn't work well alongside a plan to rewild. Our ancestors, and many indigenous peoples around the world, of course eat meat, and any attempt to hark back to a less artificially complex, less industrialised lifestyle would surely involve some sustainable meat or game? I can see the logic in this argument, but even if I wanted to keep eating dead creatures for my own sensory pleasure, which I don't, we are also facing a looming climate crisis, and as an environmentalist I really can't justify personally eating meat either. So. There we go. I guess it's a modern, millennial kind of rewilding that I am doing here. But I'll take it!

Leena Norms has an absolutely fab, entirely non-judgemental, non-pushy video which sums up a lot of my reasoning around choosing this diet - here it is. 

One conflict I had this season was fairly laughable. In general we're not a daytime TV household, but I found that when I wanted to roll out my yoga mat in the morning, the best way to avoid being maimed by a toddler trying to "help" me into my poses was to flick Bluey on for half an hour. Except, when I then wanted to turn Bluey off again so we could get on with our day, all hell broke loose. Navigating the storms of tantrums and tears each morning made the yoga practice much less relaxing than it should have been (and the sound of Bluey and Bingo chirping away in the background was surprisingly hard to tune out during savasana), but I had noticed a difference in my strength and flexibility after only a few weeks of fairly disciplined home practice, and really wanted to keep going with it. Attempts to encourage the Spud into the garden or sandpit instead were met with dismissal on all but the sunniest of days. I'll let you know if I ever find a solution to this one!

On the topic of the garden, my feral approach to gardening was providing some interesting results. In the spring we discovered that our garden was full of bluebells, and I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn't just gone blundering in and weeded away everything in sight. It was also full of stinging nettles, but I was quite reluctant to pull those out, much to the confusion of visitors, as I had read that they're an important habitat for caterpillars and butterflies.

Our bird feeder had finally caught on amongst the local bird community, and we were welcoming blue tits, robins, blackbirds, and a variety of little brown guys that I'm not quick enough to tell apart. Unfortunately, the birds also ate our peas and beans, and the feeder also attracted a sleek, golden-brown rat, who at time of writing has taken up residence under our shed and can often be seen sitting beside our humane rat trap with what I'm certain is amusement. I know rats in the garden aren't ideal, but I'm reluctant to introduce poison into the environment, especially with my child around. It's also not the rat's fault we don't want it there, so we're persevering with humane traps and deterrents for now. We also have a resident hedgehog, which really surprised me as we live quite centrally in town and border a busy road. And a squirrel who races through the trees every morning as if commuting to work. 

Unfortunately we also have a large number of field mice, who set up camp in the house (and ate my husband's Easter eggs, much to his disappointment) - we tried catching them and releasing them far away, but they bred faster than we could trap them. Eventually we found ourselves adopting two lovely cats from someone who couldn't keep them any more. Dai mainly wanted a rodent deterrent, as sweeping up mouse poo is no one's idea of a good time. The Spud and I were excited to have family pets to stroke and fuss over. So everyone wins.

Social media has been my biggest bugbear lately. I've now got two different apps on my phone to try to help me manage my usage, and I find that I'm either turning them off, uninstalling them when they prove inconvenient, or simply opening social media in my tablet browser. This is such a big step backwards and I'm really not enjoying it. I don't want to be the kind of person who chooses their destinations by what will make the best photo. I don't like courting followers, and in all honesty I'm slightly alarmed by my propensity for oversharing. A lot of my close friends have recently stopped using Facebook and Instagram, just as I'm probably the most active I've ever been, and I'm steeling myself to follow their example. I might lose followers. I might lose book sales. But if I carry on on this trajectory, I feel I'm losing a lot more than that.

It's not all bad news though. The defining event of this season for me was my long-anticipated wedding. It was a glorious day, made even more special by the people who came together to share the celebration with us, and on a very personal note it was really the first time I was able to see how far I've come since starting this blog. I never realised that reducing my consumption was going to be a personal development project more than a financial one, and yet over the last couple of years my confidence has skyrocketed. I've learned that no one is watching and judging me because everyone is busy judging and monitoring themselves. I've learned that perfection is overrated and boring. And I'm lucky enough to be surrounded and loved by people who are supportive, open, free-spirited and kind. 

When I realised I couldn't dance in my wedding gown I changed into a vest top and harem pants. My bra had carved red divots around my ribcage, so I decided 'sod it' and took it off. I then spent the evening dancing with my friends, or by myself, without fear or self-consciousness. At one point, on my way to the toilets, I heard the throb of music from up a flight of stairs and followed it to find a live band in the building next door, where I danced with strangers on a floor strewn with golden stars.

On the weekend of our wedding, I walked barefoot on new territory. I worked a lock on the canal. I stood atop a long barrow and felt the wind stream through my hair. I saw my friends' faces bathed in firelight; I felt the prick of bird claws on my hands and legs; I drank mead with Druids; did yoga in a yurt; danced the Macarena with a flock of Goths.

I have tasted the wild. I have found the bigger life that waited on the other side of my inhibitions. 

Dai's interest in history has helped me widen my horizons, connect to the landscape, and begin to see my home country in new ways. Parenthood has changed my sense of self and taught me the breadth and depth of my endurance and strength. Growing older has taught me about seizing the moment and forging memories with those we love. Trying to reduce my consumption has led me to an animistic worldview and re-engaged my creativity.

Now that I have touched the edges of the kind of life I want to be living, I am more determined than ever to get there. I love the person I am becoming, and I am so excited to see what comes next.

Inspirational reads this season:

Strong, Calm and Free by Nicola Jane Hobbs

Dandelion Hunter by Rebecca Lerner

Going Zero by Kate Hughes

Sustainable Minimalism by Stephanie Marie Seferian

The Planet-Friendly Kitchen by Karen Edwards

No-Buy: A Weekend in Glastonbury

Hey guys! I'm feeling pretty positive on this current incarnation of my shopping ban, and I've surprised myself a couple of times so far.

My first weekend on the shopping ban was actually a really big challenge, as we spent two nights in Glastonbury, which is chock full of temptation for me. When we originally planned the trip I confess I'd been looking forward to a Glastonbury visit with no shopping ban in place, but as the time came closer I could feel myself getting worried and uncomfortable. The thing is, I've been on so many big blow-out spending sprees over the years, I know what the aftermath is like, how long it takes me to get back on my feet financially if I overdo it, how guilty I feel having to shovel everything in my wardrobe to one side to make room for new. The high doesn't last. The repercussions do. 

All that said, there was of course still a part of me that wanted to shop. It's the same part of me who compares myself to other people, who wants to be noticed for the way I dress, for whom no wardrobe ever feels like enough because there's always this underlying sense of lack. But I know now that if I stop shopping for long enough, that feeling of something missing mysteriously dwindles away. It's imaginary.

I rocked up at Glastonbury's big Medieval Fayre feeling trepidatious. In all honesty I hadn't been able to decide how I wanted to handle this, and I spent the first hour or so on tenterhooks, waiting to feel those pangs of want!, for my contactless card to start flashing about. But that's not how it went. I looked at everything on the market. There was a necklace I liked. I couldn't afford it, so I didn't buy it. I had a cup of nettle cordial. It was pale pink and delicious. I started to relax.

We watched a joust. Dai tried his hand at axe throwing. We sampled lots of free mead. I was so bowled over by my absolute lack of desire to buy all the things that I ended up almost in a daze. Eventually I bought a blackberry lip balm for £3 and had two sparkly hair extensions put in for £1 each. Perhaps it would be more impressive if I'd stuck absolutely and totally to the letter of the ban, but I really feel like this was a big achievement for me and I'm happy with it. It didn't even take a huge massive effort not to buy piles of clothes and accessories. It didn't feel like any kind of sacrifice at all.

The people-watching, which is always on another level in Glastonbury, reminded me that I do love beautiful things and unique styles. But ironically, hiking backwards and forwards across town carrying a tired three-year-old also reminded me why I like to keep my look fairly low maintenance nowadays. I'm not afraid to try new looks and get a bit weird with it - my makeup over the weekend ranged from the full face with flicky eyeliner to nothing whatsoever to smearing some bio-glitter under my eyes and calling it a day - but I'm tired of worrying about what other people think of me. If I want to wear an antlered headdress or a flower crown then I will - but at other times I'm a shoeless scruff with mud under my nails or salt in my hair, and it's hardly photogenic but I'm done competing for the Best Dressed Weirdo Imaginary Award.

On our last day we took a walk around the shops. I love seeing displays and all the unusual things for sale, I'm still not the perfect anti-consumerist, but in all honesty there wasn't much I actually wanted to buy. I got some new candles for my altar and three books. Again, not perfect in ban terms, but for a whole day spent walking around shops filled with my every woo-woo hippie desire, I decided to cut myself some slack. Mostly I just enjoyed the sunshine and walking around with the Spud, watching the people and smelling the incense. It's quite nice that my days out no longer come with the sickly desperate feeling that accompanies spending hundreds of pounds on a whim. I'm so proud of myself for not buying clothes, I can't even tell you. (However, I am now over the book budget I set myself at the beginning of the year, so it'll be cold turkey for me from this point onwards!) 

A sidenote: I didn't actually tell Dai that I was doing another shopping ban, which I guess is a bit weird of me. I think where historically I have failed a lot at these things I wanted to see if I was going to actually stick to it before making any grand announcements. And sometimes it's easier to crack on with things if people aren't watching you and analysing your odd behaviour. Plus, around the time I started this ban I was also transitioning to vegetarianism, which had kind of unsettled Dai, as we have previously enjoyed his roast dinners or steaks together on many an evening. I suppose I didn't want him to think I was gratuitously punishing myself. (As an adult I've mainly been vegetarian or vegan; when my last long-term relationship ended I also started eating meat (several close friendships also blew up in a big way around this time - in hindsight it was possibly some kind of breakdown, let's gently gloss over that), and was still doing so when I met Dai. But I'm not comfortable with it for ethical and environmental reasons and it feels like a weight off my shoulders to just not. Dai worries about this because of my history with disordered eating, but I don't connect vegetarianism with disordered eating at all, it's not about weight or restriction in any way for me, I just don't want to eat animals.)

Overall throughout my first week I felt really good about the challenge. All the things I relished about the experience the first time around came flooding back, as I found myself less distracted, less self-conscious, more present. I found that when the urge to improve myself by making purchases came bubbling up, as it sometimes does, a bit of experimentation with make-up or a creative change of outfit could generally assuage it without difficulty. I felt more clearheaded, able to see items in shops as analogues of items I already have - oh, a necklace? I have necklaces already - rather than things I needed to accumulate to be whole.

My Clothes Don't Define Me

Recently I started feeling annoyed at the amount of time I have spent thinking about my clothes. How many hours I've wasted on Pinterest trying to build a blueprint for the look I really want. I've tried to use my wardrobe to express and to define my essential self, even when I didn't really know who that self was. It's been enjoyable at times, but at others deeply frustrating, as I've learned that clothes, on their own, don't make a personality. I've treated 'the wardrobe issue' as a problem to be solved before anything else. I'll write this book once I've sorted out the wardrobe issue. I'll be an artist once I look artsy enough. Everything the wrong way around, as I try to make my clothes speak for me, to define the limits of my character and interests with exactly the right garments.

Pinterest is a time eater and no mistake. Five more minutes quickly turns into an hour of blankly browsing through other people's faces and outfits. This is not the way I want to spend my life.

However, much to my surprise, I learned through Pinterest that I love what the kids are doing with fashion these days. If styles like fairy grunge, goblincore, cottagecore, adventurecore, earthcore and dark academia had been around when I was a confused ex-goth looking for new ways to express myself, I would have had such a good time trying all these out and rummaging through the charity shops for new pieces. The little gremlin voice in the back of my head (I call him Keith - go away, Keith) tells me I'm too old for goblincore, but I remind it that I've been into these aesthetics since 90s styles were 'in' the first time around. (I'm glad 90s clothes are back. I liked them then, I like them now. I just wish the bigger sizes would start making their way into second-hand shops. Mumma wants some baggy jeans please kids.)

When I was a teenager, there were really strongly drawn lines between subcultures and the mainstream culture. You were a 'chav' (or 'townies' as we called them where I grew up) or a goth or emo, and that was pretty much the entirety of your options. Whichever box you fitted into, you were supposed to hate everyone in the other. Nowadays, as far as I can see, the boundaries between what is mainstream and what is alternative seen to be much more fluid. There's a lot more scope for individual expression, and even in my small town I have noticed much more variety in everything from outfits to hair colour. Is fairy grunge alternative or mainstream? Do these distinctions still hold relevance?

I've spoken before about what it means nowadays to be 'alternative', which I think has changed a lot since I was young. I still have friends who feel very strongly about their allegiance to alternative subcultures (and one or two who refer to people outside their particular scene as 'normals', which makes me cringe), but I do wonder exactly how alternative it is to simply shop on different websites - Attitude instead of SHEIN, Killstar instead of New Look. I wonder if now, having radical politics, building a style from sustainable, ethical or second-hand clothing, or choosing a lifestyle such as veganism or going off-grid is perhaps more alternative, in this era of clothing abundance and tolerance for bright hair and body modifications, than choosing to belong to a subculture. How much are we actually defined by our clothes these days, now that most of us in the global North can buy anything from anywhere and adopt any style as fast as it can be shipped out to us? Is darning your socks a greater challenge to popular culture than wearing nothing but black?

(Brief tangent: Gothic Charm School, a blog I followed avidly back in the day and still enjoy, recently-ish touched on the white, pretty, thin homogeny that has become the image of goth on social media. I noticed this myself when I browsed #goth on Instagram for some outfit inspiration, and was both disappointed and unsettled by it. The blog post is here if you are interested, and I LOVED reading all the comments as well, being reminded of what it was about the goth scene that spoke to me in the first place and causes me to linger forevermore around the outskirts of all things dark and spooky.)

If the sheer vast size of the clothing industry has caused even alternative fashion to lose its meaning, why are we still so obsessed with fashion? Perhaps more so than ever before? Will supply and demand ever hit a ceiling, or will it keep forever growing until we abruptly discover we can't actually live on shoes? (Eating a pair of leather shoes will keep you alive for about a week, according to a book of facts I read once, but it'll be a horrible week, I'd imagine.)

At the other end of the spectrum, I have been increasingly alienated from my friends who enjoy wearing trendy clothes and keeping up with what's fashionable. I'm the awkward lurker in the group chat when the girls are discussing L'Oreal foundation and new dresses from SHEIN. Do I weigh in and talk about animal cruelty and sweatshop labour? Sometimes, yeah. And everyone says, yeah, wow, that's terrible, the atmosphere gets a bit stilted for a minute, and then we all go right back to doing what we were doing before. I don't want to constantly be a downer - that person who only pops up in the chat to tell you why you're wrong, yikes - but I also don't have anything much else to contribute. I was genuinely surprised at a friend's house when she received several parcels from Boohoo. In the little bubble I've created for myself since I started writing this blog, I'd kind of assumed that since we learned Boohoo use modern slavery to make their products, people would have just stopped shopping there.

After that visit, during which my friend tried on several stylish Boohoo dresses to choose an outfit for a wedding, I found I was really missing the particular feeling of cheap, abundant fashion. The haul. When you buy more than you need, just to try it, because it's so cheap. I used to run around Primark just throwing things into my basket. I didn't ever expect to miss that feeling, because I know full well that it's a signifier of exactly what's wrong with the fashion industry. But there I was anyway. Luckily I had a brainwave - I downloaded the second-hand shopping app Vinted, and spent an afternoon using up all my data browsing fast fashion that other people didn't want. I bought four items for £20 and felt sated.

This post has rambled around a lot, which is a not-inaccurate portrayal of how it feels in my head when I think about my wardrobe. I even have strange, nostalgia-tinged, longing dreams about dressing up in miniskirts and fishnets, my pre-baby body miraculously restored. I enjoy the ease of casual clothes, but miss the admiration from more complex, unusual looks. I also realised recently that I am more affected by body image issues than I thought, which is why I feel uncomfortable and awkward when I do dress up - I feel like I'm too chubby and un-pretty to be able to pull off those looks any more.

I really need to get my head together. I can see that I'm still giving clothes way too much importance, and trying to make them define me when they don't, and can't. That's not what they're for. 

Saved by Stylish Vegans: Make Getting Dressed Great Again

I guess this post could be considered a reprise of Beauty Care for Wild Women, with a nod towards Toxic Femininity.

A couple of months ago, we had a day out at a vegan market in a nearby town (we've been cutting down our meat and dairy intake drastically). I had an absolutely fantastic time - it was sunny, I ate my own body weight in free samples, I bought a lot of plant-based cheeses, and I had the most incredibly delicious seitan "chicken" burger for my lunch - and I also came away feeling hopeful and uplifted. Firstly, it was great to see that more environmentally-friendly ways of living are becoming more popular and accessible, and secondly, the people-watching was absolutely on point. After a day of admiring stylish vegans with all kinds of different looks, it dawned on me that it was completely and perfectly possible to be someone who cares about ethics and the environment and also look good.

Although I knew in theory that 'lots of people doing a little bit is better than one person doing everything perfectly', and I hoped to gently encourage my friends to try a cruelty-free product or think a little more about the environment, I'd also read that 'it's better to kneel now than to fall from ten feet later.' I was (am) so convinced that we are staring down the barrel of climate change disaster that I'd just kind of given up on myself. Might as well get used to not looking nice, I won't be able to afford luxuries in a few more years anyway... Whether this depressing apocalyptic view is correct or not is up for debate, but it made me no kind of poster girl. 

It had started as enjoying a more low-maintenance look at the beginning of my shopping ban, but after a while I started feeling guilty for occasionally wanting to indulge in luxury or vanity. After all, the environment...

After the market, I realised that schlepping around feeling miserable with my hair scraped back, skin dull, no eyebrows and plain clothes was not only making my day-to-day more crap than it needed to be and knocking my confidence unnecessarily, but it was hardly doing a good job of promoting the eco life to my beauty-loving friends. I've come to this realisation once or twice before since I've been writing this blog, but finding it too easy to slip back into the same habits.

Meanwhile I'm still trying to operate in the everyday world - see friends, go out, do things - and as I was neither looking nor feeling my best (and haven't been, in all honesty, for some years, as I've just gotten so in the habit of not bothering), the old comparison trap was rearing its ugly head again.

I found this time that the best way to deal was to just make sure I was really happy in what I was wearing before going out for the day. Sometimes this means taking the time to blow-dry my hair and apply a full face of make-up. Other times I'm happy to go barefaced but need to pay extra attention to my outfit. 

While I don't really like to budge from my crunchy-granola ethics when it comes to cosmetics - I like things to be cruelty free, preferably made with natural and organic ingredients, and the packaging should be home compostable or recyclable - I'd been kind of half-assing it with nothing but a dab of coconut oil here and there. This might well work for some people, but eventually my skin and hair let me know that they needed a bit more pampering, and I bought myself a new moisturiser, a face mask and a deep conditioning treatment. It was good to feel that I could look after myself appropriately but without compromising my standards.

Likewise, by paying that bit more attention to what I'm wearing and how I feel in it, I can feel more confident and enjoy my clothes more without feeling like I need to rush out and buy something new every ten minutes. Sometimes I forget, throw on any old thing and end up feeling a bit glum, but in general I'm feeling a lot better in myself.

I also decided to tackle some of the appearance-related niggles that had been bothering me in a low-grade way for quite some time, but which I'd been ignoring as I didn't want to spend money on my appearance or acknowledge that I'm not 100% low maintenance and cool about the way I look. I was no longer happy with one of my tattoos, so I went to a tattoo artist and had a chat about how to improve the situation. Frugal? No. So very worth it? Yes. Similarly, I tentatively spoke to my hairdresser about tweaking my style a little bit. I didn't need to buy a lot of things, but I found I could feel a lot better on an everyday basis by not ignoring my feelings and making those tweaks.

Sure, it would be great if I was perfectly happy with every aspect of my appearance, but that isn't the case - same as for most people - and trying to tough it out and ignore those feelings was making me feel worse, not better. I was aiming for neutrality towards or acceptance of those bits I didn't like, but somehow ended up making myself feel like I wasn't allowed to enjoy looking good at all.

I'm trying to find the balance between taking care of myself, honouring myself, being a happy and functional person, but without doing more harm to others, including the rest of the ecosystem, than I can live comfortably with. 

Toxic Femininity

Not long ago I met up with my bridesmaids - six of my dearest friends - for morning coffee. Socialising with other women post-lockdown has been a bit of an eye-opener for me - embarrassingly, I had kind of forgotten that not everyone has been in the same echo chamber as me, worrying about climate change and learning how to cut down their consumption. Actually, I kind of completely forgot that lots of people aren't generally thinking about their consumption as problematic (whether it is or isn't, which of course is not for me to decide, although I would suggest that all of us in the global North perhaps need to think twice about our normalised habits) or obsessing over ethical fashion and cosmetics, and had to work at not pulling a disapproving-grandma face any time anyone mentioned PrettyLittleThing or L'Oreal.

What I have been working on, however, is being more open and honest about stuff (hopefully in a gentle way), so at one point I did find myself saying to two of my particularly glamorous friends - one of whom I haven't seen without make-up and impeccably coiffed hair since we were in primary school, and one of whom I have never seen without the whole arsenal of femininity in play - that I'm amazed by how they do it with two children apiece when I find it a challenge to shave my legs with any kind of regularity, let alone find the time for flicky eyeliner, and I wished I could ever manage to be as groomed.

Once they'd finished laughing at me, they told me two things: firstly, that skinny jeans can be hiding all sorts of things, so even the most fabulously turned out woman might possibly have not got around to shaving for three months, and apparently this is pretty normal. 

Secondly - and here one of my very oldest friends flicked her elegantly curled, highlighted hair, looked me dead in the eye, and said, "Well, I wish I didn't feel like I have to bother with all this -" she waved a hand to indicate her make-up and curls "- just to feel like I can leave the house. I wish I could be more carefree. I feel like other girls who don't wear make-up all the time are way more comfortable in their skin than I am. This is what I have to do just to feel acceptable, and I love it when I can get home and take my make-up off so I can rub my eyes without smooshing my mascara all over the place."

Okay. So that was me told. I was kind of stunned, to be honest. How had I managed to angst about my girl envy all this time without ever considering things from the other side of the fence?

Another thing we talked about a little bit - perhaps inevitably - was weight. I guess out of the seven of us, probably three or four are on a diet at any given time. Even I bought a scale this year, but I'm going to talk about that whole mess in another post. Suffice to say for now that eventually I had to sit down and re-read Just Eat It, and that while I was doing so I suddenly realised that the way a lot of women feel about their weight and looks - not good enough, must constantly improve - is also how I very often feel about the way I dress and the things I own.

What diet culture and consumer culture have in common is simply this: it's about control. When you fall too far into these twin traps, your thoughts are forever rattling around the same hamster wheel: what should you eat, how do you look, what should you wear, what should you buy. When you walk into a room, or down the high street, you automatically and semi-consciously rank yourself against other women - who's the thinnest, prettiest, best-dressed? 

More and more of us now are becoming aware of the toxic and damaging messages of diet culture, but I haven't often seen it linked to the parallel trap of overconsumption. Yet to my mind the insidious connections are obvious - people with low self-esteem are far more likely to spend more, not just on gyms, diet foods, supplements and all the other accoutrements peddled by the nutribollocks industry and its influencer poster children, but also on clothes (to conceal, to sculpt, to flatter, to commiserate, to aspire to), cosmetics, treatments and surgeries. Treat yo'self - self-love can be yours, right now, for this one-off bargain price of the cost of bath bombs, crystals, candles, lingerie, gym gear, hair dye, new nails, fake tan, gym membership, microblading, laser hair removal and a plant-based wellness spa retreat in the heart of the Cotswolds. 

I feel like this weird self-hating soup of diet culture, overconsumption and influencer culture is to women and femme-presenting people as toxic masculinity is to men. Things we might otherwise enjoy for their own sake (clothes, fashion, beauty, movement, food) become tainted by this bizarre set of rules for how we are 'supposed' to look (exist).

Stay in your box. Keep your attention fixed on the way you look. Build your brand. Get thin. Get thicc. Get strong. Get noticed. Be different, but also accessible. Be relatable, but also better. Have the right kind of eyebrows. Suck your stomach in. A little bit of FaceTune never hurt anyone. So authentic (#ad). It's not a diet, it's a lifestyle change.  Don't rest on your laurels. Don't rest, period. Don't consider being content - there's always something else you can tone, sculpt, tweak, improve, buy, buy, buy. 

It's all the same trap.

Imagine: if being a woman wasn't a secret competition to be the best woman.

Imagine: feeling content. With what you have. With who you are.

Imagine: if you took the time you put into beauty routines and wardrobe overhauls and decluttering and shopping and diets and faux wellness and used it instead to rest and recharge. 

If you could walk into a room without a) picturing how you looked walking into the room and b) immediately ranking yourself against everyone there.

What your social life would look like if no one was worried about their body, their skin, their clothes, their hair. 

If we re-framed self-esteem as something you build, not something you buy, and made it contingent on something other than looks or wealth.

If we stopped buying - literally - into the bullshit.

Be More Glastonbury

When I told Dai that I'd decided not to run a shopping ban this year, he said, "Oh, good," which told me - in a typically laconic Dai way - that people around me probably thought it was time for me to take a break as well. I'd paused tracking my spends, too, but in the end I decided to try a slightly different approach. Tracking my bills, groceries, and spends out of my control - repairing broken windows, recovering my dad's untaxed car - was getting a bit pointless (and depressing). Those costs were static, or unavoidable. I'd switched my energy suppliers, reduced my grocery costs as much as was feasible - there was nothing more I could do there. Sometimes, your best is all you can do. And tracking the costs of days out with my son was starting to feel like setting an unneeded limit. 

Instead I decided to focus on the spends I still wanted to reduce - clothing and accessories, books, and cosmetics. I knew what I had spent in those categories in 2021, so for 2022 I decided to keep a running total of just those categories with an annual budget in mind, rather than writing down all my purchases every day. That way I could still purchase if I came across something spectacular, and might not feel quite so obsessed. After a few years focusing on what you can't do, it feels refreshing to look at things from a different angle.

And in fact, I had been wondering - was some of my inability to complete a shopping ban due to my starting point? In 2019 when I first started, I had an awful lot of clothes, which I had been buying in a kind of scattergun approach. Following the end of my previous long-term relationship (thirteen years - over half my life, at the point when it ended) I wasn't really sure who I was as a single person. It was surprising how little I knew about what I liked, and what made me happy. Meeting Dai, having our baby, changed my outlook still further even as it rendered a good chunk of that existing wardrobe obsolete. (I've gone from a size 8/10 to a 14/16, and given it's been three years I don't think I'll be getting much smaller.)

In these recent years with Dai I have been able to explore and fine-tune my tastes, interests, likes and dislikes, and now when I choose clothes it's with a much better idea of who I am, what I will wear and how I want to look. The shopping bans, though they may have failed, served a necessary purpose in slowing me down so I could get to know myself. And my shopping behaviour has changed accordingly. I rarely shop online now, my Amazon wishlist has dwindled to just a handful of books, and I don't waste my evenings endlessly browsing for the 'missing pieces'. I've finally been able to clear out some of the things I really didn't like to wear, and this time I know I've made the right choices - I was braced for regret, but instead I felt relief.

A phrase I often use, in the privacy of my own mind, is, "Be more Glastonbury." This a a reminder to myself that it's okay to be a bit weird, not to be everybody's cup of tea, that sometimes an open mind and a sense of wonder is what you need. (I use Glastonbury because it's somewhere I go regularly, but equally you could substitute Stroud, Brighton or any other quirky, colourful and magical place that attracts seekers of the extraordinary.)

Sometimes, I find that when I use this motto it nudges me towards the bright, sparkly, gift-shop aspects of Glastonbury. I think of flowing skirts, jewel-coloured lipsticks, glittery hair extensions, flower crowns and opalescent nails, fairy wings and bumper stickers that say: 'Caution: Faeries and Elves in back seat'. And whilst I can't deny the appeal of this version of Glastonbury, I've spent the last few years learning that, whilst self-love, self-care and self-esteem are essential, image is fun to play with but it isn't everything.

I tend to obsess about Glastonbury when I'm at home, but when I'm there, it can be a bit overwhelming. I'm comparing myself, watching, worried I might miss something, worried I might lose control and buy everything. Sometimes I get a weird dose of imposter syndrome - should I be 'more different'? Other times I feel other people there are playing a part, all show and no substance, and I feel contemptuous about the pre-packaged gifts and glitz - magic for sale, devoid of meaning. 

But there's no denying that reminding myself to 'be more Glastonbury' has been useful. I've slowly opened my mind to new possibilities, started to dress more the way I really want and stopped worrying about what others think, focused more on creativity, spirituality and well-being, and learned to embrace what makes me happy without needing to compare, judge or label it (or myself).

Being more Glastonbury doesn't (always) mean buying trinkets or adorning myself. Glastonbury also means live music, a community fridge, an organic food co-op (named after my matron goddess), sacred sites, art galleries, a non-toxic hair salon, bookshops and libraries, a magical landscape, being connected to the community and the environment. It has temples and abbeys; ancient wells and sacred springs, deep roots in folklore and myth. It's not just a big shiny shopping centre. I have to remind myself to peek beneath the glossy facade. 

The truth is that I don't think I'm ready to complete a year-long shopping ban. Perhaps, if I spent 2022 being more Glastonbury - enjoying getting dressed, buying less, playing music, finishing that clear-out, sticking to a regular practice of meditation and yoga, reading my unread books, spending time in nature, watching the changing seasons, going barefoot in the garden, avoiding mass-produced products, reading poetry, and finally starting on that novel, then by 2023 I might finally be in the right place to do the thing. But by then, would it even be necessary? 

Letting Go of Labels

So, I have this one friend who makes me feel inferior. It's not her fault, it's entirely in my own head. At times I feel as though we have this weird imaginary secret rivalry, and sometimes I think she might even be doing the same thing, as our conversations seem to revolve around name-dropping and casual oneupmanship - who has been to the most obscure concert? Who has the most bizarre haircut? Who has read the most dark yet intellectual novel this year? Sound pointless and exhausting? Well, yeah. It kinda is. 

Eventually I realised that every time we hang out (which isn't often, these days - are you surprised?) I come away feeling like I need to amp up my weirdness and make it more visible.

I've always loved alternative fashion. When I moved on from my intense goth look, a lot of my friends expressed disappointment. They had enjoyed that I didn't dress like everyone else. But I've always found that my style is a fairly fluid thing. I take inspiration from a lot of places and I don't like to be limited to one palette or set of parameters. For a while fairly recently, after the flamboyance of being 'alternative' for most of my young life, I enjoyed the simplicity of T-shirts and jeans with no make-up, especially as a new mum. It felt freeing. But after a while, I found I didn't feel great about the way I looked.

One (brave) friend eventually commented, "I feel like this is just how you got used to dressing when you were pregnant. I don't feel like it's really 'you'."

I was furious about this for a while. But to some extent she was right. Between the all-consuming nature of parenthood, my 'eco-anxiety', which makes me feel as though the apocalypse is generally hanging over our heads (I mean, it is, right?) - might as well give up on looking nice when we'll all be killing each other over the world's last potatoes in a few weeks - and some vague, never-fully-expressed background thoughts about patriarchy and beauty standards and freedom, I'd slid into a rut of trying extremely hard not to care about how I looked and kind of hoping it would read as punk-rock-devil-may-care rather than, well, boring.

Every now and again I'd catch an unflattering photo of myself and think, wow, I need to get my shit together, but you know how it is, there are always more dishes to do, and the toddler mushed my eyebrow pencil anyway, and I'm saving money by not buying cosmetics, and Dai likes that I'm not so high maintenance... And so it would get pushed to the bottom of the priority pile over and over, manifesting only as uneasiness, a loss of confidence, feeling awkward in social situations.

Enter a visit to Secret Rivalry Friend. I feel bland in my jeans and jumper. That night I dream about - honestly - dying my hair radish-pink and getting a snakebite piercing. I hate this feeling that I have to be a certain amount of alternative for it to count. Like, all the little things that make me - make anyone - unique - music taste, reading material, sense of humour, talents, guilty pleasures, hobbies - don't add up to anything if I don't adopt the appropriate uniform.

I have a similar issue with Paganism. This is ridiculous, I know, but I always feel I ought to dress the part if I'm going to a public ritual, an esoteric shop or even a place with a notable Pagan community like Glastonbury or Burley. I worry that I won't be taken seriously if I don't look, well, witchy enough. 

And I find this tendency in myself deeply, deeply irritating, because the older I get and the more I learn, the more I find in myself that doesn't fit into a neat little box. The books I like to read. My music taste. My interests. My dress sense (which dependent on mood and activity runs the gamut from Animal to Mary Wyatt London via Wobble And Squeak, for want of a better way of describing it). And, yes, my Pagan practise also. 

I don't consider myself particularly 'eclectic', and what I do generally seems to fit under the banner of Druidry, but if I squint at it from different angles, on different days and in different moods, there's green witchcraft, kitchen witchcraft, a sprinkle of Wicca from time to time (I grew up in the 90s; Wicca was my intro point), a lot of wanting to be Terri Windling when I grow up, and a fair amount of winging it, with a sprinkle of 'stuff the house spirits told me to do'. Is this a thing? Is this Pagan-ing correctly? I really have no idea. But it seems to work for me. So generally I keep my mouth shut around people who might complain that I'm doing it wrong, and get the hell on with it.

And, to come back round to clothing - honestly, a lot of my actual practise seems to involve crawling into hedges or going barefoot or wandering about in rain and gales, so as I've alluded to before, when I look the most mystical I'm generally doing the least actual work, and when I look like a pasty, messy-haired anorak I'm probably feeling extremely Druidic. (Sadly this does not translate well socially - people do not see the anorak and go, "Aha, she's like super connected to nature and stuff,", they go "wow, she's really let herself go." But never mind...)

I've wandered, as I often do, far from the original point I wanted to make, which is that realistically, I like a lot of different and diverse things - I'm not sure why, in my head, I've made this into something to minimise or apologise for. This competitive comparison aspect isn't fun in my friendships, my daily life or in my Paganism, and I figure that the best way to get rid of it for good is to throw out all the labels and do what feels good to me. Looking nice doesn't mean always looking the same, being alternative doesn't mean adopting a uniform, and uniqueness is not something you have to wear like a badge. I want to embrace my different influences and inspirations by allowing myself to be as chameleonic as I please.

Diderot's Dressing Gown: The Answer To the Question, "Why Am I Like This?"

For a long time, one of my greatest frustrations has been this ridiculous way of thinking I have, whereby my style, appearance, wardrobe, preferences and identity are all tied up in one enormous, oddly-shaped, possibly ticking parcel, onto which I become desperate to stick a label.

 "Ah..." says my brain. "I see you are admiring those patterned harem pants. This means you must be a HIPPY. Come now, cast aside your former identity as a non-hippy, put on this patchouli and go out and buy some bangles forthwith."

However, on the way to the bangle shop (bear with me, kids), I am tempted by a velvet cloak and some mugwort tea.

 "Ah..." says brain. " I was mistaken before. You are in fact a PAGAN. Come now, cast aside those harem pants and let us seek some altar statues and medieval gowns."

On the way to the medieval tailor I stop to admire a pair of combat boots.

 "Ah..." says brain. "It appears you are a GOTH..."

And so on. You get the picture. I have this whole mishmash of things I'm into, but my brain would really rather it not be a mishmash, and instead be a nicely defined category with a set of convenient searchable keywords. Whatever new item I'm most in love with suddenly becomes The! Defining! Piece!, and I immediately want a completely new wardrobe (personality/bookshelf/living space) that channels the same vibe. Given that in my time I have run the gamut from dreadlocked hippy to befanged goth chick and back again via a brief dalliance with pink velour tracksuits and furry moon boots (what can I say, I'm changeable), this gets very old. And tiring. And confusing. Not to mention expensive.

Turns out there's a name for this kind of thinking, and it's not actually uncommon, although my brain's fetish for alternative lifestyle niches that may or may not exist ('granny punk' was a descriptor I once briefly used, for example) may not be typical. 

Allow me to Wikipedia at you: "The Diderot effect is a social phenomenon related to consumer goods. It is based on two ideas. The first idea is that goods purchased by consumers will align with their sense of identity, and, as a result, will complement one another. The second idea states that the introduction of a new possession that deviates from the consumer's current complementary goods can result in a process of spiraling consumption."

Boom.

You can actually see the Diderot effect working on me in the second half of this post I wrote in April. The term comes from this dude Diderot, a French philosopher, who several hundred years ago was given a new dressing gown. In comparison to this new item, the rest of his stuff started to seem lacklustre, inelegant, tacky. Diderot replaced his straw armchair with a newer, swankier model in Moroccan leather. Then he got a new writing table to replace his old desk. And so on, and so on... until he ended up in debt.

"I was absolute master of my old dressing gown," Diderot lamented, "but I have become a slave to my new one."

Grant McCracken, who coined the term 'Diderot effect', also spoke about 'Diderot unities'. This is similar to the way my brain clumps consumer goods together under basic labels: goth stuff, hippie stuff and so on. Most of your stuff will quite possibly represent your preferred Diderot unity - this is what you might think of as 'your style'. 

"A Diderot unity is a group of objects that are considered to be culturally complementary, in relation to one another. We as consumers, strive towards unity in appearance and representation of one’s self-image and social role. However, it can also mean that if a beautiful object deviant from the preferred Diderot unity is acquired, it may have the effect of causing us to start subscribing to a completely different Diderot unity," says this article. This sounds rather similar indeed to my bewildered bouncing from style to style over the last decade and a half.

Happily, the above-linked article also has some suggestions on how to defeat the Diderot effect - most of which are markedly similar to those I have blundered into through trial and error throughout my shopping ban attempts, including:

- Unsubscribe from marketing emails

- If you need to buy something, e.g. new clothing, make sure it works with your existing stuff

- Don't browse shopping websites

- Hang out with your friends somewhere that is not a shopping centre

For myself, I'm hopeful that just knowing the Diderot effect is at work, and being able to recognise it, will help to negate its power.

So there you have it. Learn from my mistakes, and those of a French philosopher in the 1700s: don't be a slave to your dressing gown.

The Life You Want Is Not For Sale

August last year was a breath of fresh air after lockdown as we were able to go on our annual trip to our favourite little cottage in Pembrokeshire. I drifted onto Pinterest and Instagram once each, and wasn't able to tear myself away from my emails as much as I would have liked, but the holiday was an interesting benchmark to see how I was changing. 

Our first visit, I was heavily pregnant, had no real sense of identity and so was shopping constantly as if I could build a self that way, and found it a relief to give up wearing make-up (strange now that that once seemed so radical!) and immerse myself in sightseeing and novels.

Our second, I was not far into my first attempted no-shop year. The Wi-Fi had arrived, and I was anxious and plagued by comparison, desperate to improve myself in various ways as I didn't feel up to the standard of other women I saw. This was the year of frantic Pinterest- and ASOS-scrolling in bathrooms.

This year, I felt much more relaxed and comfortable in my own skin. I kept up with messages, surveys and emails, more because I felt I should than because I wanted to, so I didn't get that complete sense of escape, retreat and renewal, but it didn't get out of hand either. I enjoyed trying local foods, and I did make some purchases, including a second-hand knitting book from a junk shop, a hat from a woollen mill we visited, and a skorts situation (one of the most useful items of clothing I own! Dries really quickly and has three pockets!) from an ethical clothing store we visited so that I could go swimming comfortably whilst on my period. I felt much more engaged with and aware of nature - we spent a lot of time on the beach, swimming, clambering over rocks and finding incredible things in rock pools. And the comparison was gone - hooray!

In September, our trip to Glastonbury rolled around, shortly before my birthday. Again, I made some purchases - the first of which was a book on nålbinding and a bone needle from the Viking shop Wyrd Raven (love me some heritage crafts!). 

As usually happens when I find myself in places where everyone is a bit alternative in manner of dress, I felt a bit boring and basic. I can't win with this. If I bust out the velvet dresses and shitkicking boots I feel self-conscious and like The Weird Friend(TM) (I have friends who do introduce me as "the weird one" - they don't realise I'm actually really super-sensitive and cry a little inside). If I wear jeans and t-shirt I feel plain and unimaginative. But the comparison is a far cry from what it used to be, and I don't need dreadlocks and a cupboard full of dubiously sourced crystals to be interested in the environment or to enjoy Glastonbury. 

We had a busy weekend of sightseeing, drinking blackberry mead in our hotel room and (in my case) looking hopefully for faeries, and I had no difficulty with refraining from shopping until the very last day, when I broke on all counts. I couldn't resist an Instagram post, and I bought three items of clothing. I was disappointed with the first point, but not the second in the end. Although I was time-pressured (Dai and the Spud were waiting in the car) and budget-constrained, the three pieces I bought - essentially on impulse, wanting to capture the sense of excitement, unconventionality and free-spiritedness I was feeling - have turned out to be three of the most-worn, most-loved and useful things I own! A chunky multicoloured knitted jacket with a fleece lining, which has served me well over the winter, a pair of purple tie-dye dungarees, and a pair of harem pants with a muted rainbow stripe. 

Before I decided I was going to make some purchases, shopping ban be damned, the Spud and Dai and I sat eating our breakfast and drinking our much-needed coffee at a spindly table in the village square, basking in the sunshine. I was hunched over my phone, researching the ethical credentials of the shops I planned to visit, until I was satisfied I could give myself the green light to go ahead without guilt on that front. 

I was also pleased with myself because I have a clear memory from my first Pembrokeshire trip, when I chose not to buy a pair of bright tie-dye leggings, because I was worried they might "draw too much attention to me". I was happy that I was beginning to choose for myself, not make myself small or try to fit a label (I used to buy pretty much anything vaguely goth that came across my path).

Coming home from Glastonbury I felt quite rejuvenated. I expect that, living in a place that is largely pretty provincial, it's healthy to be reminded that it's okay to be a bit more 'out there'. I started to make more effort with decor around our home, and I considered planning an annual or biannual trip to Glastonbury to stock up on mead, Goddess statues, Viking jewellery and unconventional ethical clothing. 

I had a twinge or two in case this was all a bit consumerist, but at the same time I wondered (as I have many times before) whether the human soul simply needs colour, beauty and art every now and again.

A lot of my wardrobe felt a little lacklustre in comparison to my new things. I had been playing it safe for a long time - worried about attention, or vanity, or consumerism. I'd almost forgotten the joy of impulse-buying something that is exactly right, or choosing a book in a real, physical bookshop. Non-chain-store shopping that is ethical and vibrant and brings a little excitement. Surely this is not the same animal as the blind, semi-desperate basket-filling I used to do in Primark, IKEA, Zara, it's-cheap-so-I'll-have-it? Is it selling out to consumer culture to take joy in well-chosen material objects, to appreciate the things we use and cherish them, not buy them to be used once and discarded?

Browsing online started to frustrate and irritate me. I couldn't find items that produced the same spark, especially since I wasn't sure what keywords to use or where to look. Standard labels we use like 'hippie' or 'alternative clothing' mainly turned up stuff that was mass-produced, sweatshop-made and unoriginal, which wasn't at all what I was looking for (is it 'alternative' if you bought it from the same website or brand that all the other 'alternative' kids are shopping from this week? What's unique about a goth-in-a-box kit from Attitude Clothing? Tell me how that's less basic than buying all your clothes from New Look). 

Then it was my birthday. It was fantastic and felt really special - books, flowers, sunshine and a most excellent Indian takeaway. 

On my birthday, I decided that the shopping ban was to be no more. I wrote in my journal, "I want to be able to treat myself without guilt - enjoy books, films, music and art as and when I want to without feeling bad about it. And I want to learn to find a balance between spending and being frugal without going to one extreme or the other." 

Can you guess what happened next? That's right! I went to the other extreme. It started so promisingly - we went to an artisan's market, and I bought nothing. Hooray! I had discovered that I could make good decisions and apply what I'd learned without clinging to the framework of trying never to buy anything. 

Except... not so much. Online browsing, annoying and unsatisfying though it was, quickly filled up my spare moments. Within three days I'd bought six clothing items, an art piece, and some more books. Whilst the items were great, I knew I couldn't afford for this to continue, and I also felt lacking in purpose without the ban to direct me (here's a thing I should probably do something about, as I don't intend to be on a shopping ban forever). So I reinstated my limits.

I want to enjoy my clothes, but I don't want to go back to having to prove how ~alternative~ I am by buying into a 'look'. And I don't want to spend hours online, fruitlessly searching for - what, exactly? I feel like an exciting, enchanted, magical life is out there, but I just don't know how to find it or create it. I have deduced, however, that it's not for sale on Etsy.

Instagram, Eco-Anxiety and Shopping Addiction: An Evil Tag Team

In June last year, I started taking more baby steps towards the kind of life I was dreaming about. I hadn't even particularly realised, until I started reading back through my journals looking for blog material, how my life had started to change since I quit overshopping. I tried to explain it to Dai the other day, but I'm not sure I managed to express myself terribly well. I had kind of been hoping that the uptick in my sense of wellbeing and my growth in self-esteem was noticeable to people around me, but I think perhaps it has been more of an internal shift.

Although I wasn't necessarily aware of it at the time, I was starting to experience for myself the truth of Kyle Chaka's words about beauty being found in contingency and randomness, such as when I started picking up books from local community libraries and free book shops, which were springing up around my hometown like dandelions as people sought entertainment and connection during the pandemic. I deliberately chose books that looked interesting, but which I would likely have dismissed previously as 'not my genre'. It was really exciting to be open to possibility and expand my horizons in such a small and gentle way. 

On sunny afternoons we went foraging, and we ended up with so much homemade elderflower cordial that we were able to distribute bottles amongst family and friends. I was becoming aware of a new contentment, a peace of mind that I could never have purchased. I felt more connected to my loved ones - gift-giving had become a source of pleasure and joy rather than stress - and my enjoyment of nature and the outdoors was reaching new heights.

As the lockdown restrictions eased, my mum emailed me a special offer from Travelodge - budget prices from July, so I booked three days in the village of Glastonbury, one of my favourite places, for me, Dai and the Spud.

Towards the end of June, through my work with Greenpeace I ended up taking part in the Climate Coalition's The Time Is Now mass virtual lobby, for which I had to take part in a Zoom meeting with my MP (he's a prick). The day before the meeting I was shitting a brick - I'd actually initially chickened out of setting up a meeting but then decided I'd better walk my talk. I made a page of notes from Greenpeace's briefing and asks, and I was very glad that I had, because in the event, of the twenty people in my constituency who had signed up to attend, no one appeared but me! (One other lady tuned in twenty minutes late; I have never been so glad for the presence of a stranger.)

It was absolutely terrifying. I was shaking, and my voice went really high-pitched, but I delivered the list of asks and managed to mention some quite frightening statistics I had learned about how nature-deprived the UK is compared to the rest of Europe, and the sorry state of our tree cover, and also how lifeless and meek the government seems to be with regards to the climate emergency. The Climate Coalition host sent an email afterwards saying that I and the other lady had done 'incredibly', and that ours was the only meeting where only one person turned up at the start (great...). I was really proud of myself, and glad I'd done it.

In July, the evil tag team of Instagram, eco-anxiety and shopping addiction came barrelling into my life. I'd set up an Instagram account to document my no-buy year - I hoped it would keep me accountable, and it obviously seemed like a good idea at the time.

It wasn't.

Inspired by my new online community of eco-friends (their word, not mine!) I started trying to radically overhaul our life. Now, I do think that cloth nappies, organic veg boxes, natural cosmetics, growing vegetables, foraging, composting, crafting, bamboo toilet paper, home baking, charcoal water filters, toy libraries, visible mending, natural dyes, bee saver kits and so forth are all good things... However, trying to invest in and do all of these things in the space of a single month exploded my budget and didn't do my peace of mind many favours either. I was also spending a couple of hours each day on Instagram, which brought my mood down without fail. Everything I was doing still didn't feel like enough. At first I enjoyed being part of an eco community, but after a while, every time I picked up my phone I felt like I was being bludgeoned with more things I ought to be doing.

I found it slightly alarming at times that I'd suddenly become this person who cooks and darns things and grows vegetables and gets excited about birds. I'd become the baggy-fleece-wearing sandal-clad make-up-free mum type I would have heaped scorn on as an arsey teenager. Adding the pressure to promote my new lifestyle on social media and also change the world by buying everything marketed as 'sustainable' was overdoing it, and I was soon knocked for six by a vicious migraine, as if to make sure I got the point.

Yes, I was extremely worried - terrified, actually - about the climate. But sustainability isn't simply something you buy, and blowing my recently restored savings wasn't going to save the human race all by itself (sadly). I do believe in supporting the supply chains that try to do good things and mitigate the bad, but I also believe in buying less. And I didn't want to undo the positive changes in my own life that had been wrought simply by shopping less. 

So I got Dai to change my Instagram password, and deleted the app. I tried to go easy on myself - I didn't screw up the environment by myself, and I can't magically fix it either.

And we went out foraging for blackberries and elderberries to make our first wine. I wanted to stay anchored in the world around me, the world that over the last few months had filled up with colour, as if I was coming back to life instead of just getting out of my own head.

How To Tell If the Universe Hates Your Minimalist Wardrobe

May 2020 marked the end of my first attempted shopping ban. Frankly I was surprised I'd remained interested and motivated for a whole year - including keeping notes in my journal every day! 

The funny thing is, I'm not sure that at this point I was any more secure in terms of 'personal style' than I had been at the beginning. But I was happier, calmer, gradually becoming more creative, and much better with money. I still had quite some way to go, granted, but I spent some time just feeling proud of myself and how far I'd come. I'd learned not only to live within my means but to enjoy it and to thrive.

At the beginning of May, I was fed up with my endless routine of thinking (and feeling bad) about my clothes - keep, go, mend, donate, bag up, unbag, test, try, restyle, repeat til fade. It was all congealing into a major mound of annoyance and decision fatigue and I wanted a break from dealing with it for a while. So I packed away the vast majority of my wardrobe - around 200 items at the time - and embarked on Project 333, wherein you wear only 33 items for 3 months.

Yet on day one of my 33-item wardrobe experiment, the Spud climbed into my lap and joggled my arm at an inopportune moment, spilling coffee down the front of my hoodie. On day two, I got my first period in eighteen months, which turned several of my potential bottom-half garments into uncomfortable prospects. 

On day three, my comparison fever reared its ugly head for the first time in months after encountering a well-dressed older woman with quirky, colourful style. I ended up on Pinterest, that hellhole, spent ages on it, then got bored and cross and remembered why I'm great the way I am. 

On day four, I was about convinced that the universe was trying to tell me something when a bird shat on my cardigan. 

I gave up and unpacked the rest of my wardrobe. You can't argue with a message like that.

My comparison stumbling block had got me thinking. I'd been feeling a bit worried because I didn't seem to know exactly what I like any more. My tastes had shifted without my noticing somewhere along the line, perhaps as part of getting older. But I was hoping that as I go along, curating - to use one of the media buzzwords of the moment - and carefully accumulating the right things and discarding the excess, it will all eventually come together. It doesn't matter if I can't make sense of it all right now - as long as I stay open, authentic and notice my honest feelings about stuff (check out that band regardless of whether you historically listen to that genre, read that book if it excites you even if it's not 'relevant', don't watch the movie that you're really not interested in even though everyone else is raving about it, if you never ever wear those shoes don't keep them), I'll get there. It's not as though I have to sum it all up and put a label on it (or, heaven forbid, a hashtag). 

I just hate uncertainty and change. I want everything about me to be static, finished and complete. But that's not the way it works. We grow and learn, change our perspectives and opinions, open up to new possibilities. I need to stop trying to BE something, accept who I am and let it ebb and flow organically - instead of trying to force it into a shape so I can define it.

It was as though I couldn't stop thinking about THINGS in one form or another - how many, how few, how do they define me, what should I own, what should I own next, tomorrow, next week, next year?

I came across a couple of quotes from Kyle Chaka's book The Longing For Less that held resonance for me: "One act of will is to erase everything that's already around you, washing it clean and starting again so that the only things left are those you choose, which is the standard practice of minimalism. This is a simple way to build a sense of self. You are what you include... But favouring control leaves no room for surprises. A more difficult, perhaps more deeply satisfying method is to embrace contingency and randomness, accepting that life is a compromise between what exists and what you want, and beauty is found not by imposition but through an absence of control."

 And, "Minimalism is thus a kind of last resort. When we can't control our material security or life path, the only possibility left is to lower our expectations to the point where they're easier to achieve." 

Over the next year, I decided that I wanted to knuckle down with staying off the internet - or at least, those bits of it that seem to muddle my sense of self and diminish my imagination - and tackle those lingering shopping behaviours, such as browsing for things to buy 'in future'. I don't need to know right now what exact jeans I will buy when my current ones wear out!

In the end, I quit Project 333 because I wanted to make use of what I have, not just jettison stuff to meet an arbitrary goal of minimalism (you don't actually get rid of the rest of your stuff to do 333, but I was looking for things I could cast off). I agree with the principle of simplicity, but I don't think that the way to get there is to focus harder on my stuff.

In May, I also spent a bit of time looking at the Humans of New York website. It reminds me that what I'm wearing is the least interesting thing about me, and provides a good antidote to comparison thinking. Everyone's story is unique, each one worthwhile.