Confessions Pt I

I'm coming to terms with my self-diagnosed emotional spending disorder (or Oniomania) and feeling nothing more than a cross between Hannah - from Girls, and Becky Bloomwood - of Confessions of a Shopaholic. By coming to terms with it, I mean recognizing it and having no idea what to do about it.

I collect images in my head - or virtually on my screen, compiling them into outfits and making it seem as if I really cannot go on without them. I'll search for them endlessly. I'll end up finding five other things in the process, deeming them equally as imperative and voila. Most times I set out to search for things, it's after emotionally draining events or conversations. No matter the current state of turmoil, the clothes always provide a degree of certitude that I cannot find anywhere else. While almost all stable aspects of my life are now, never what I've known; the clothes provide the comfort of knowing that they are always what I've known. I know that maxi skirts will be perpetually too long, that I buy within a certain comfort zone, and that the shoe will always fit. I know what I like, I know what fits and what doesn't, and I know the sizing scales that will determine that per retailer.

 It's the perfect formula for temporary satisfaction to a much larger problem of which I have not reached the root. Trying on, deciding on, and leaving with,  all contribute to the fleeting elation I experience. Walking back to my building thinking not of all the things troubling me, but of all my newly gained friends and all the outfits I will compose of them. However this gleeful distraction is truncated as  moments after I set the bag(s) down in my room, a sense of flatlining emptiness comes back to me. Just because I have all these things, doesn't change the circumstances I cannot control. It doesn't make them anymore bearable, or allow me to come to terms with them. All it does is enable me to distort reality for short-lived periods through procuring a variety of things, to distract me from my own unhappiness due to the uncertainty of events surrounding me. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Barbara Kruger Image, also CC: Usher.