Making Room in My Mind: A Year of No Shopping

January 2019 is one week old and I haven’t shopped for more than a year now.
I just finished my annual challenge for 2018: no shopping for clothes, shoes, handbags or jewelry. Way back in April 2018, when I wrote about the experience at three months, I had a clean feeling, as if I’d cut something pleasurable, yet toxic, out of my diet. At six months, a fog had cleared after that initial detox and I was starting to get a look inside my shopping mind. By the time nine monthsrolled around, weeks might pass when I didn’t even notice that I wasn’t shopping.

I spent December, the final challenge month, in Paris, a city I go to often and where I always shop with great pleasure and, yes, I admit, abandon. This was the final test of my personal odyssey — Mina as Ulysses tied to the mast of her shopping ship so as not to succumb to the fatal call of the beautifully clothed Sirens. In reality, the buy-me-buy-me-and-me-too siren song played on mute and I was not tortured by an overwhelming desire to shop. That said, I didn’t throw myself in the way of temptation either. I circumnavigated my favourite shoe store (I could hear it singing anytime I was within two blocks), because I didn’t want to look-but-don’t-buy whatever new Laurence Dacade boots were on offer. What I miss most is not having the memory of Paris contained and made tangible by the items…