In my last entry, I shared about how difficult it’s been for me to adopt hobbies in my spare time because kid Tina wasn’t taught that her interests mattered. So if I haven’t been spending my spare time on hobbies, what have I been doing with it? Enter shopping and social media, my two most preferred — and destructive — pastimes. I feel like each of these deserves a separate entry to unpack, so I will start with shopping.
My interest (okay okay, obsession) with shopping started in my childhood, where ‘what I wanted’ wasn’t only irrelevant in the sense of interests, but also in a material sense; we just didn’t have any money for shoes, clothing, and other things I came to view as status symbols. I would ogle over the latest fad, like LA Gear light-up sneakers or stirrup leggings (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you clearly weren’t born in the eighties). The fact that I couldn’t have these things made me feel helpless.
So, when I started making my own money, guess where it went? The feeling of being able to buy what I wanted, when I wanted it, gave me a warped sense of control over my life. I began to associate the experience of shopping as a window to my powerful, independent life. As a result, I leaned into shopping with my time, my money, and my creative spirit.
Fashion in particular fuelled me: I loved watching for trends, populating and re-populating my wish list with slight variations of the same tops, sweaters, and jeans, and devoting endless hours to the hunt for these things in malls. I loved the experience of perusing the racks, picking outfits to try, and feeling like a million bucks when they fit perfectly in the change room. As soon as I found an item I was looking for, three more were added to my ‘want’ pile. Soon, shopping became a full-blown non-hobby.
Flash forward to the year 2021: I’m 36 and I rarely let a weekend go by without shopping. I work in sustainability, so buying things has already been an area where I’ve been making improvements for some time, cutting back on my purchases and channeling what I do buy into the second hand industry; but that doesn’t mean I‘m not still spending my time on the hunt. I still frequent the stores, I still make wish lists with feverish passion, I still think and dream and obsess about clothes.
Shopping and fashion have been very much intertwined for me. To be clear, I think that cultivating personal style is a great way to express creativity, but where it veers into unhealthy territory is the fixation on relentlessly acquiring new things. A hobby should enhance and provide for a well-rounded life, giving you space to find meaning and fun while exercising your physical, mental, emotional or creative energies. To me, shopping is like a mental hamster wheel: the faster I go, the sooner I end up back where I started. On top of that, the endless amount of time I spend on it steals me away from things I could be doing that actually bring me meaning.
My struggle with shopping is still very much in progress, but I know I want to cultivate a different lifestyle. I think there are redeemable parts of this non-hobby that can be redirected into things more harmonious with my values. I want to explore my personal style without the associated commercialism: shopping my own closet, recreating looks I find inspiring, and building capsule wardrobes. These pursuits are on my *try new things* list (spoiler alert, more stories to come).
I guess what I’m saying is I want to update my relationship with shopping because it’s not bringing me joy like I thought it would when I was a kid. And it’s definitely not fulfilling enough to me to be classified as a hobby. Part of my impetus for trying new things is to shed the old dysfunctional ones. I can’t be sure I’m not going to make mistakes, but I hope you’ll stick with me on the journey.
