Shtopping Update: Day 77

Oooh, I was supposed to post a Shtopping Update on Friday (10 days in to the Shtopping Experiment) and I didn't, because I was in Chicago for a conference.

The view from our 23rd-floor condo overlooking Grant Park.  When my writing team goes to conferences we rent from VRBO instead of staying in the stuffy, expensive, soul-killing conference hotels.  Sometimes this turns out not as fancy as being in a hotel, sometimes it's fancy as hell, like this one was.  But having good company and a kitchen is the best part.  Plus, you have to walk to the conference, so you get exercise and choose your panels wisely.

Historically, Chicago has been a major shopping temptation for me because they have all those big, magnificent chain stores on Michigan Avenue that seem to have All of the Things.  Also, conferences can be lonely, dehumanizing affairs where you are stuck concentrating under fluorescent lights unable to move for long periods of time.  If this sounds very similar to some kinds of torture you can think of, you would be correct.  Shopping felt a lot like freedom after such experiences.

And I'm sure I don't need to remind you that retailers think that we are already in the Christmas season, even though we are still a few days away from Thanksgiving.  The special hell that is Black Friday is still four days away.  There is a deluge of marketing going on, I'm sure.

All of this is a big wind up to my telling you....nothing!  So far, Shtopping has been no.big.deal.  I haven't bought anything, and only once was tempted by an Old Navy ad that popped into my inbox and I thought maybe I should buy Addie a winter coat.  But I wisely checked in with her first and she reminded me that she prefers to wear sixteen fleeces layered than put up with the itchiness and zippers of a coat.  So I stayed strong.

The keys to my success so far have been:

1)  Unsubscribing from all the retail emails and Facebook retail posts.

2)  Work ramped up, as it always does in November, and I have been able to use the extra time from Shtopping very, very wisely.

3)  I have really enjoyed the freedom from the stress shopping always caused me.  That's a self-reinforcing mechanism right there.

4)  Most importantly, I have amazing friends and family who are always inviting me to things and loving on me and it's much easier to focus on them when I'm not trying to frantically and secretively enter my credit card numbers into a website.  My kids are extraordinary, fascinating, exhausting little beings who love my attention, and I theirs.  My husband is a closet snugglepuss who is also relieved about this experiment.  Friends include me in activities all the time that make me feel loved and happy and stimulated. 

As for conferences, I have an incredible team of co-authors who would prefer to spend their time writing interesting things with me, sharing beers together, and avoiding consecutive panel-sitting.  They also walk briskly past department store windows, a strategy that is super-effective. 

The bottom line is, when you're connected to people in meaningful ways and spend your time on stuff that is satisfying, the pull of shopping virtually disappears.  Like I said in the original post, too, I think the pull had already disappeared and I was just going through the motions.  But the avoidance shopping enabled got too uncomfortable and I realized I was missing some pretty stellar chunks of my life.

I am a little ashamed to admit that the odd package is still showing up from the pre-Shtopping days.  Mostly Christmas gifts, but not all.  I'm reminded that the temptation is always there, and that I am weak, while marketers are strong. 

77 days to go. 

Decorating on a Dime, or Maybe More Like a Nickel

First things first, I'm cheap.  Like really cheap.  I'm proud of this designation, it does not mean that I am not generous, but I don't like to pay more for something than I have to, and I get a thrill from finding a new use for what other people would throw away.

I also love decorating.  I get almost a creative high from putting things together, but I'm not good at following trends, and I know that trends mean I have to buy more stuff.  The other reason I'm not good at trends, is that I've learned, while I may love what's in your house, and how it looks, that doesn't mean I'll like it in mine.  Everyone has their own sense of style, and the houses I love the most, reflect the personalities of the people who live in them.

Whether you want them or not, here come some tips for decorating.

1.  Discover your own style.  Trends are cool, or rather, trendy, which means they won't be around for long.  Instead decorate with things that have meaning to you, please you or bring you joy.  Your house will mean more to you, and people who come over will see that.  And you'll surprise yourself by discovering that what you like, goes together.  The drawer fronts hanging up are from my grandfather's shed where he sorted his rock collection. (And, yes, that is what our bulletin board looks like all the time.)

2.  Shop your house.  When we moved into our current house it came with this gigantic hutch, which I loved, but I had no idea what to do with it.  One day my friend was over, and she said, "What's in the cupboards of the hutch?".  I showed her, and she shopped the rest of my house to make this beautiful display.

3.  One chick's trash is another chick's earring holder.  My girlfriend gave me an old colander that she no longer used because it was rusting, and I turned it into an earring holder.

4.  Shop cheap, buy used.  When I get inspired to do something different, I start looking at craigslist. Craigslist isn't the only way to shop cheap, there are always garage sales, thrift stores, and in some areas, thrift store outlets (we have one in our city where you pay for items by the pound, the more you buy the less per pound you pay).  I found this beautiful antique piano on craigslist, and the sellers rolled it into my living room all for the bargain price of $75.00.

5.  Listen to your creative muse.  When you want something specific, google DIY projects for ideas, or check pinterest.  That's how I made this cool mobile for my daughter's room.  We made tissue paper flowers, and I strung them using differing lengths of yarn that we had on hand, an embroidery hoop that was kicking around the house, and the handle of an old purse I saved when the purse died. Which brings me to my next point.

6. Save everything.  I'm not condoning a hoarding disorder, but if you're about to throw something out, and there's a possibility it might be used in some other way when the creative muse visits, and you have room to store it, keep it.  We found these old window frames in a closet of the house when we moved in, and when I finally decided to do something with the blank wall above my kitchen sink, I ran up and grabbed them.

7.  Ask advice.  If you're not sure where to hang that piece of art, or what to do with that basket you got at the church rummage sale, ask a friend who's decorating sensibilities you admire.

Club Club

I'm a member of this book club.  Ok, book club may not be the right term.  Jen's husband, Eric, calls it Club Club, and that may be more fitting.  I've been a member of this club since my children were babies, (the youngest is 7), and really this club started even before we started reading books together. It really started when my best friend, Kristyn, started inviting her friends over to watch Desperate Housewives every week.

I was a housewife at that time, and with infants at my breast, and not much other human contact to speak of, feeling pretty desperate.  We would gather every Sunday, bring snacks and wine, and have the show on in the background while we soaked up pressure free human contact. 

As time went on, people would come and go from the group, but the same four or five people remained at every gathering.  As happens in the lives of busy women, people started to lose interest. Kristyn suggested taking the core group of women, adding a few more, and starting a monthly book club. 

Like many other book clubs, we read great books, discussed them a little, drank a lot of wine, and ate a lot of food.  

Book club was the best part of my month.  Getting together with these incredible women from diverse backgrounds, political views, and philosophical persuasions was so stimulating for me.  It reminded me that I was interesting, intelligent, and separate from my roles as wife and mother.

I admit, before book club,  I was one of those women that was sure she didn't like having relationships with other women because they could be so "catty".  These women taught me that I was wrong.

There are moments with this group of women that would definitely meet the conditions of "catty". We've talked behind each other's backs, had yelling matches over politics, plotted and schemed against each other, and have learned so much about unconditional friendship and and the redeeming quality of forgiveness. We've taught each other so many lessons, about parenting, relationships, business, self acceptance and love, that I'd relive every "catty" moment all over again.  

And we've had so much fun.

We've had crazy nights out.

Been there for each other's milestones.

We've even hopped on our bikes and pedaled 5 miles for some beer and burnt fried food.  

The best part of book club, hasn't been the amazing intellect of the women there, the fascinating and enlightening conversation, or the time away from everyday stresses to learn who we are at our core. It's been the friendships we've made.  

Book club has been there for me, when I was sad, or needing to learn to love my body, or having trouble with my spouse, or children.  These women have forgiven my transgressions, and I have forgiven theirs and we have formed amazing bonds with each other.  

Through the years, a few have left, a few have joined, but the core remains the same, and I feel so blessed to call this group of women my close friends. 

And even though we only read 6 books a year together now, we get together every month to lift each other up, and give each other the space to be ourselves, and I feel so fortunate to be part of it all.  

Voice of Shite

Oh, man, I've been reading Amy Poehler's new book Yes Please.  Because there's two kinds of heroes in my world, and they are writers and comedians, and comedians who write pretty much are my favorite people on the planet.

[Books aren't on my Shtopping list, by the way.  I know they should be.  I know I should order things from the library and then go pick them up and read them in the allotted time and then return them.  I love libraries.  I believe in them.  We use them all the time for kids' books.  But I am an erratic reader.  At any one time I'm reading sixteen books.  I'm not kidding.  So for me it's worth it to spend $8 a book for the Kindle because it might take me a year to read one book.  Or it could take a day.  But I never know which, and the pressure of needing to pick something up at the library and return it at a certain time is too much for my little brain to manage.   And if there's one area of my life I don't need more stress in it's reading.]

Poehler has this chapter called "plain girl vs. the demon" that I just feel like every woman should read every morning of her life.  Get up, drink your coffee, read this chapter, feel better, be nicer=world, better place.

Also, it will help you talk to your daughters.  More on that in a second.

Here's a good passage from "plain girl v. the demon:"

I hate how I look.  That is the mantra we repeat over and over again.  [...].  

That voice that talks badly to you is a demon voice.  This very patient and determined demon shows up in your bedroom one day and refuses to leave.  You are six or twelve or fifteen and you look in the mirror and you hear a voice so awful and mean that it takes your breath away.  It tells you that you are fat and ugly and you don't deserve love.  And the scary part is the demon is your own voice.  But it doesn't sound like you.  It sounds like a strangled and seductive version of you.  Think Darth Vader or an angry Lauren Bacall.  The good news is there are ways to make it stop talking.  The bad news is it never goes away.  If you are lucky, you can live a life where the demon is generally forgotten, relegated to a back shelf in a closet next to your old field hockey equipment.  You may even have days or years when you think the demon is gone.  But it is not.  It is sitting very quietly, waiting for you.

This motherfucker is patient.

I just read this passage today, but I heard Poehler describe it on Fresh Air  last week.  Aside:  I listen to Fresh Air incessantly, and yes I am always interviewing myself in my own head, Terry Gross style.  I listen to that show so much that I literally feel like I know everything about everything at this point.  I can tell you things about ISIS, Johnny Cash's session drummer, and how to train cats.  No one person should really know all of that.  Except Terry Gross.

Anyway, I love the passage above, because it's just so much better than the typical response to talking about the demon voice--the Voice of Shite--which is to say, "Shut up, you're so pretty!"  Or, if you have sassy friends who are being supportive, just "Shut the fuck up."  It is comforting to know that one of my heroes, who I think is hilarious and smart and pretty, has the demon, just like I have the demon, just like we all have the demon.

My 8-year-old Nolie came into my bedroom last week and said she needed to talk.  She said there was a girl at school who was mean to her, and that every time that girl was mean to her, Nolie heard in her head the words, "You are so fat."  The girl wasn't calling Nolie fat, and Nolie's not fat, but the Voice of Shite is already ringing loud and clear in Nolie's head.  Normally moms get blamed for instilling fat-consciousness into their girls, and maybe I've done some of that.  Or maybe we all just have the Voice of Shite and need to develop some strategies other than mama guilt for addressing it.

In fact, I think I would have normally been tempted to tell Nolie that she's not fat, and to shut up because she's so pretty.  She would have whined that I was just saying that because I'm her mom.  And then I would have cycled through some heady self-recrimination and tried to figure out what I was doing wrong.  My own Voice of Shite would have kicked in something fierce.

But I had just heard Poehler's interview, and so instead I told Nolie all about the Voice of Shite and how we all have the Voice and have to learn that this Voice is not our true selves and to put it on the shelf when it makes an appearance.  Because the Voice loves to lie to us, and is a very good liar.  So good that we think it's the truth.

Nolie nodded.  She got it instantly.  And then we cried a little and she gave me a hug and got ready for bed.

I bet we'll have to have that conversation a few more times.   Maybe many.  I'm 39 and still have tell the Voice to bug off.

Poehler ends the chapter by saying that we eventually figure out what our "currency" is, and that really helps to shut the Voice of Shite up.  She figured out hers was not being "pretty" but it was being "funny."  And it doesn't make sense to argue about this and say well, Amy Poehler is pretty (she is).  Because the point is that's not where her identity lies.  It's not where her true self lives.  And chasing after that would make her less pretty, less sexy, and probably less funny.

I wonder if this is why I've been feeling better since the whole gray hair decision.  I know "authentic" is a tricky word, but it describes how I feel.  More myself.  Perhaps this is because it opened the door to liberating myself from a currency I was always trying to attain (prettiness?  youth?), which is freeing me up to live my real currency, which I think might be writing and teaching and sass.

No wonder I love those funny writers and gots to read all the books.

Shtopping: Day 90

Okay, here's the Shtopping Game Plan:

1.  Post updates:  I'll post about my progress every 10 days.  In an effort to keep my innate narcissism at bay, I'll try to keep them short and sweet.  You're welcome.  But also:  accountability.  Important.

2.  Cancel all shopping emails:  I died a little, hitting "unsubscribe" to each and every one of those special offers.  Oh, the deals I'll be missing!  But I have a feeling they will be there when I get back.  But it's like getting your gym clothes on in the morning even if you're not working out till afternoon:  you got give yourself every chance you can of making the leap.

3.  Unfollow my fellow shoppers on Facebook.  I belong to a couple of awesome communities of ladies who are obsessed with shopping and fashion.  They're also just hilarious and dry and silly.  I'll be sorry to not be a part of those pages for a while, but they're just too good at enabling.  I'll see you in three, ladies.  Maybe.

4.  Gifts and necessities are still on.  Gonna be Christmas soon, and there are birthdays and stuff.  So I'll still shop for other people for the holidays.  And if I run out of toothpaste, I'm not going to reach for the baking soda, I'm going to get more toothpaste.  This isn't an eco-stunt (though I love those).  I'm just trying to re-set my system.  A shopping cleanse!

5.  Thailand is exempt.  I'm going to go visit some elephants in Thailand at the end of January, and those ten days are shopping exempt, because I want to buy gifts and souvenirs, and also it's implied that we can support the local tourist-dependent economy that way.  I haven't fully thought through this yet, but I'm keeping the possibility open.  These ten days won't be included in the overall dealio.

K, that's it.  Next post will not be shtopping related, I promise!

Shtopping

I've always had a little shopping problem.  Growing up, we didn't do much shopping, that I can remember, probably because my step-dad cycled in and out of being unemployed for a few years and also we had a lot of child support payments to make.  Shopping wasn't really a kid thing either, that much, in the 70s.  Not like it is now.

I'm pretty sure I had one of these in lavender in the 80s.  Or at least I really wanted one.  And also I wanted parachute pants and clothing from Benetton.  But I remember mostly wearing a turquoise velour turtleneck track suit my gram made.     There were lots of itchy, homemade clothes.

I remember from a really early age being hyper-aware of clothes and name brands and, generally, other people's stuff.  I'm hyper-notice-y about things.  So some part of me was prepared at a cellular level to fully participate in the consumer culture anyway.  Then when I was a teenager we inherited some money and I got to go on a few modest shopping sprees, and it was like a junkie's first encounter with heroin:  I've never forgotten the rush, and have chased after it ever since.  The promise of getting to be a new person with each trip to the mall or each package in the mail is pretty enticing, especially if you're kind of unhappy anyway.  And you can make it happen any time you want.

There were credit cards in college and student loans in grad school, but I always worked and we just kept climbing the professional ladder, E. and me, and so the lifestyle inflation never seemed like that big a deal.  I'm not a hoarder and we're not dealing with mountains of debt.  We drive crappy cars and live in a pretty modest house.  I've never bought a $300 designer bag.  So:  perspective.

'member these?

But I still spent more than I wanted, and often hid spending, and we've never saved as much as we should, either.  In the background was always the awareness that I was using the shopping for something, that it was helping me to avoid or check out or breathe.  And there are better ways of breathing, I've found.

E. was unemployed most all of last year and now is working in a trade, for an hourly wage.  He comes home happy, unlike the years when he was an engineer and seemed to have a dark cloud over his head everyday.  We're grateful.  We feel pretty peaceful.  A little freaked out, but peaceful.  We're happier than we've ever been, by many measures, even though I had several months while he was unemployed when I was terrified and very, very unhappy about being forced to transition out of the lifestyle I thought I had to have.

Just:  What.  What can be said.

I think we're largely over that hump.  We have a budget.  We've cut back on a lot.

Except:  sigh.

Except:  the clothes.

Once E. started working again, I started shopping again, at the pre-unemployment level, sadly.  We don't have the money for me to do this, and there is an increasingly large part of me that doesn't even want to do it anymore.  It's like a boring old habit where I just do it and am starting to notice myself doing it and not even feeling so much shame or embarrassment or anger but just fatigue.  Like:  let's get on with it already.  Like, I order things and then return them.  Which is time consuming and stupid.  And I'm over it.

Well, I feel some shame and embarrassment.  It's scary making this whole thing public, to all of you.  Now you see this about me, and also now I'm accountable for what I'm about to do.

Yazzle.

Still, this is what's going through my head, so I put it here, on the blog.  Plus, there's so many other reasons not to spend time shopping, besides expense.  Like:  I don't like it. I want to spend my time doing other stuff.  It's keeping me from feeling some good, important, feely-feelings.  It puts distance between me and other people because I just focus on things.  It keeps me from being myself sometimes, in a weird way.  The clothing industry is super polluting.  Advertisements suck.  Marketing is manipulative.

The list of greatest hits is long.

I'm a black and white person, and all-or-nothinger.  Examples:  I learned a ton about my body by ditching a nine-year vegetarian streak and going totally paleo for three weeks; I picked up Crossfit after being told I was never going to run again by a doctor; I've been letting my gray hair grow in, day by day, cold turkey, which has taught me all sorts of things about myself and how I feel in the world, and how I think about beauty; I moved back to the hometown I swore I'd never return to, and my soul just lit up like a Christmas tree over it.

And now I'm going to try not shopping.  My old friend, my old crutch, my albatross:  I salute you.

Now git.

For three months.

Which freaks me out.

But I'm gonna do it.

Here we go.