What If I Love It?

Illustration by Mike Thompson

When my therapist is feeling down, she goes on Etsy and looks at tiny handmade outfits for dolls. I tell her I love that. I do something similar, except the outfits are for me.

I started seeing her for help with my moods—my blues and my mean reds, or what they more clinically call my anxiety disorder. When we started meeting, I told myself I would never bring up that one thing about the clothes. I wouldn’t tell her about my shopping habit. It hurts no one but me in the weeks I need to pay rent and eat, but those weeks only come around once a month or so.

“Consider this my Confessions of a Shopaholic, if you will.”

You’re not my therapist, so I’ll let you in on a little secret. Consider this my Confessions of a Shopaholic, if you will. This is not an admission of my guilty pleasures. I recently decided I don’t believe in guilty pleasures after listening to writer and style icon Fran Lebowitz riff on Netflix’s Pretend It's A City. “I think it’s unbelievable that there’s such a phrase as guilty pleasure. In other words — like, unless your pleasure is killing people. My pleasures are absolutely benign, by which I mean, no one dies. No one is molested,” Lebowitz said. “No, I don’t feel guilty for having pleasure.”[1] Lebowitz is a woman who enjoys her little treats and simple pleasures. She wants to have her books. She wants to have her navy Brooks Brothers blazers and her blue jeans. She likes to read and talk and doesn’t seem to enjoy counting dollars or spending much time thinking about money at all. I tell my television I love that. 

My mom often buys herself little treats; she likes perfume, boots, and sweaters the most. I don’t judge her for this, even if she spends more money than she should. We rarely did things just the two of us when I was young, my mom and I, but when we did, we went shopping. I provided feedback for every piece she picked up and she didn't like it when I said something too negative, so I saved my worst shots for absolute no’s. My mom would try to time our arrival back home so my dad wouldn't be in the kitchen and we could run our bags through the kitchen, hallway, dining room, and up the stairs to our closets. The problem was that my dad was always in the kitchen. So usually, when we got back from Bon-Ton, Fashion Bug, and the Eastern Hills Mall, we would just run past my dad with the bags, trying to obscure their real sizes as best we could, while my mom told him that everything we bought was on sale.

Photograph courtesy of the author

My mom taught me very young that fashion was a coping skill, not in so many words, but through expressing her love by buying me the boots in both colors because we couldn’t choose between the blue and the green. She was always so happy when we were shopping, so I was happy too. My mom and I are one and the same in many ways, from our highlighted hair, to our shoe size, to the way we feel everything around us intensely and skeptically. For us, shopping is a state of flow; it takes us out of our schedules and into a fantasy world.

It would only be logical for someone to look at my spending habits and wonder why I would do this to myself. A pessimist may say I’m a self-sabotaging shopping addict who can’t keep her money. She would say I’m insecure and buying sweaters to hide the shape of my body. She would say I never learn my lesson. A pessimist would point out that a hobby shouldn’t drain your bank account. A hobby is a skill; it isn’t consumption. A hobby leaves you feeling accomplished, not guilty. She would remind me that the thrill—oh, the thrill of rushing through the online checkout process before I can think twice, and the giddy anticipation of waiting for my dress to arrive in the mail, and then the ecstasy of ripping open the package when it finally arrives—never lasts. A pessimist would ask: “is all of this overcompensation? Is there an awkward eight-year-old inside of me clicking “add to cart” so I can feel more valued by my peers? Is this because I don’t like the size of my thighs and my arms? Is all of this a cover-up? The cover-up is worse than the mistake, you know.” But I’m not a pessimist.

“Can’t a girl just be in love?” an optimist would ask in reply. 

A realist would tell me to end that thinking spiral. She would pull me out of my daydream and ask me to put my phone down and exit out of Pinterest, and Etsy, and The Real Real, and Vogue, and Instagram, and go for a walk. Draw a picture. Read a book. Don’t spend money I don’t have. Save the money I do have.

“In a consumerist culture that cultivates shopping addictions, how does anyone define abnormal?”

Oniomania is what scientists label shopping addiction. Approximately 6% of Americans, or 1.83 million people, are thought to be compulsive shoppers, according to VeryWellMind. It says shopping addiction is “a behavioral addiction that involves compulsive buying as a way to feel good and avoid negative feelings, such as anxiety and depression.”[2] It is defined as “an abnormal impulse for buying things” by Merriam-Webster and “an uncontrollable impulse to spend money and to buy without regard to need or use” by the American Psychological Association’s dictionary. [3] [4] In a consumerist culture that cultivates such addictions, how does anyone define abnormal? How does anyone define need? What if I consider it a hobby? 

My psychiatrist recently prescribed me an additional drug. She put me on Wellbutrin to combat some of Lexapro’s side effects. Lexapro targets the serotonin swimming around my brain while Wellbutrin targets the dopamine. And Wellbutrin, I recently learned, is often prescribed to people who are trying to quit smoking. My therapist mentioned it could help with binge eating and other addictions too—including shopping. I told her: Oh, well that’s good.

My internal optimist reassures me that I buy many things secondhand. She gently points to my MaisonCléo wool cow-printed vest and skirt (which I affectionately call my “cowfit”) and says I support small and sustainable businesses. She thinks of the sheep prancing through Northern Spain whose woolen fleece produced my Babaà sweaters. She strokes my knit scarf from Savers Thrift Store and tells me I shop as responsibly as I can, avoiding the fast fashion trap. Her eyes might fall on a pair of pants I purchased at Target a month ago, but I would slowly hide them under my dresser with my foot while the pessimist snickers. 

“It’s not that I don’t like being me, but it’s nice to have a break. ”

The thing about shopping is that it allows me to indulge my fantasies. I can cloak myself in fabrics and inhabit whichever character I want to be. My new Rachel Comey dress—dark olive, cowl-neck, long-sleeve, maxi-length, drapey—transforms me into a wizard. I am Buffalo’s own Professor McGonagall. In my ketchup-red, chunky Camper boots, I’m suddenly a sexy Ronald McDonald—a surprisingly good look, really. With my eggshell cashmere scarf tied beneath my chin, protecting my wild hair from the wind, I’m Audrey Hepburn floating to get coffee. It’s not that I don’t like being me, but it’s nice to have a break. 

***

Paradoxically, I strive to be content so much that I usually never achieve it. I focus on what is wrong with me, him, us, them, my wardrobe, society. I critique. I look for errors. But every once in a while, my mind exits its dark cave and shuts up and succumbs to the present moment. Then I look around like a newborn baby seeing her mother’s smile and I feel grateful. I used to think the opposite of anxiety was calm. I now think that it’s gratitude. 

I sat around a table this weekend for dinner with my boyfriend and our friends. We were on our porch. ‘When did we get an apartment with such a nice porch?’ I thought as our friends gushed about the scenery and I could see it through their eyes. The sky was overcast in that colorful way that happens when it’s hot and humid and it was going to rain but ended up being sunny instead. The air was warm with a breeze. Our street was suddenly alive with dense green trees. I was several little blue goblets of boxed Pinot Grigio into the evening. The conversation was boisterous. It was beautiful. I felt content. I felt grateful.

I told my friends while we set the table that we looked like cabin people, but they didn’t know what a cabin person was. Who would? I made up the term. Cabin people spend their summers and falls, and sometimes even winters, out in cabins in the middle of nowhere, cooking dinner together, laughing around a fire and looking an admirable combination of rugged, comfortable, and chic. They don't have anxiety. They wake up with nice hair and nice thoughts and both remain when things get messy, or at least, that's what I assumed from their smiles, which I had only ever seen through my screen. 

You see, I only know cabin people through Instagram. No one I know well is a cabin person, because cabin people aren’t real, or complex, or messy. Cabin people are sweaters, and campfires, and citrus beer, and homemade salads. They are fantasies that are sold to people like me all the time. Even the cabin people I follow on social media—strangers to me—can’t be cabin people in real life.

A cabin person is my own construction. A cabin person will only ever exist inside of my head to remind me that I will never be good enough and neither will life. Cabin people are jealousy. They are social media at its most toxic. They are the lies of capitalism and fun-house mirrors and clothing advertisements (which are often as much about models laughing and acting like cabin people as they are about clothes). If I can appreciate beauty in my own life as much as I can in the lives of others, then I will buy fewer things because I won’t need to try to attain what they have; I’ll be perfectly happy with what I have already. If I can find a way to sit with reality’s imperfections and enjoy it all anyways, just for what life is and for nothing more and nothing less, then I will become the person I want to be. I won’t find that in a cabin, or in a photo, or in a store. I can only find that in me.

Notes

1. Pretend It’s a City, directed by Martin Scorsese (Netflix, 2021).

2. Elizabeth Hartney, “An Overview of Shopping Addiction,” VeryWellMind, July 4, 2020, https://www.verywellmind.com/shopping-addiction-4157288

3. Merriam-Webster.com Medical Dictionary, s.v. “oniomania,” accessed July 1, 2021, https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/oniomania.

4. American Psychological Association Dictionary, s.v. “oniomania,” accessed July 1, 2021, https://dictionary.apa.org/oniomania.