My Year of No Shopping. An Epilogue.
To write an epilogue, one must review the entirety of the story. And I’ll be the first to admit, folks, I had no desdire to do so once the Year of No shopping was over.
I wanted to move on.
And I had other, more pressing things to tend to that trumped reflection and dissection.
But here it is, March 2nd, 2024, and I finally found Time and space and curiosity to look back.
The impetus to not shop was born out of Ann Patchett’s experience, and all the Time that not shopping freed up in her schedule. I’ve learned how very much such a promise revealed some of my own values. Time being one of them. I’d choose Time over stuff any day.
And yet, as I mosied down memory lane, it was clear that putting that value into practice proved challenging. The world around me bombarded me with New Stuff at every turn. And man, I often took the bate!
But before I get ahead of myself, I want to recap. So let’s review the rules set in place prior to no shopping:
unsubscribe to stores’ emails;
deleting certain apps (I’m looking at you, Target);
and then we decided not to unsubscribe from Amazon, but take the app off my phones so that to access the store, I’d need to use my computer (hassle, amiright?).
And then there are the agreed-upon purchases already planned and/or needed:
Our 2022 Annual Heirloom Album (obvi)
Storyworth books for our parents & brothers
House projects already decided upon (paint for 3 rooms, plastering the fireplace, landscaping the backyard [read: hostas & ferns, mulch], supplies to build planter boxes for the garden)
Shoes & clothes for our daughter (kids keep growing, it seems)
Essentials/supplies but only if we don’t have anything else that could replace it already
Presents for our daughter for her birthday & Christmas (she didn’t sign off on this challenge)
My annual skincare bulk purchase that takes place every Black Friday. This is how I resist buying every shiny new serum that hits the market and convinces me it’ll solve my wrinkle woes. (Never works. Ever hopeful.)
2 mulligans each (my husband suggested this; two freebies because he is reasonable, and we are fallible)
We never got around the plastering the fireplace (but it’s still on my list!). And I refrained from the Black Friday bulk skincare purchase. Everything else, we bought. And then some.
I kept the apps off my phone for the majority of the year but I feel like they appeared like magic, back on my phone sometime around the holidays, when it was time to shop for my daughter’s birthday and Christmas presents.
In the end we both cashed in on more than two mulligans. My husband hung up his hat sometime in the fall, and frankly, I’m impressed that he lasted that long. As for me, here is what I ended up buying:
a pair of $20 shorts at Target
yoga gear (towels, knee-friendly mat, and a full-length puffer coat for the freezing months because to emerge from hot yoga at 7 a.m. in freezing temps is a death sentence)
plane ticket to NYC
Disneyland Christmas ornament
Mauve sweater
a television & accompanying roller stand
a lazy susan for the kitchen countertop
tartan dog bone stocking
velvet green dog bow
the online class: How to Make Textile Coiled Baskets from Craft a school Oz (A Black Friday purchase that I wanted since January, and still wanted in late November)
Niki’s Face Yoga class (she’s still a queen, I’m still hooked, and the class was super discounted on Black Friday so here we are)
2 violas
a floating nightstand
And a partridge in a pear tree.
My goodness was my mind consumed with toiletries and serums and shampoo. (Update: the shampoo bar - alluded to in February, June, purchased in November - delivers on the promise and I’m ecstatic.) But by focusing on toiletries, I came to embrace the art of shopping my house. Why just yesterday, I gave myself free rein to sort through a cabinet and a shelf in our laundry room, and I found my stash of Japanese serums.
For a long time, I shared my lists of wants with you all. PHEW: humility comes in many forms! You try rereading your log of wants during a Year of No Shopping. Actually, no need! Allow me to do it for you. I want for nothing, but I wanted A LOT. At some point, I grew tired of clocking my every desire and stopped keeping a list. It wasn’t that I stopped thinking about wanting more things, but my life and my Time started filling with other stuff.
And by stuff, I mean practices, activities, and passions.
I threw myself headfirst into hot yoga. Not by forcing it, but because I couldn’t stay away. I showed up on my mat, nearly every day at 6:00 a.m. with no expectations except to arrive on time to get a good spot. And at some point, months in, I noticed that I could actually do balancing poses - sometimes. That my body could stretch deeper, my leg could extend a smidge higher in that 3 legged dog pose.
My daughter and I started playing the viola. It wasn’t terribly fun at first, despite the most magical teacher to ever grace my presence. But then, five months in, she handed us a duet of Jingle Bells, and we could play it. That miracle was only born out of the fact that we’d practiced, even when it wasn’t fun.
And I wrote a book. I finally, after thinking and stewing and putting it off for two years, wrote the damn book. Is it a $hitty first draft that needs epic rewriting? It is. But editing and rewriting is my happy place. And I couldn’t have arrived at my happy place if I hadn’t allowed the draft to be horrible as I forged ahead. I only have that draft because I showed up every day for 100 days - and wrote.
My Year of No Shopping became My Year of Practice. Yoga, viola, and writing. Body, mind, and soul.
I didn’t set out with that intention. But as a recovering perfectionist, to lean into the art of practicing is a wild achievement for me. For so very long, my brain told me that if I couldn’t be the best, why bother trying? How much I missed walking through the world like that.
So in 2023, I just tried. I tried to do the tree pose and I fell. The next day, I tried again. One day, I didn’t fall, but I did not expect that that would be the norm. I tried to hold a viola bow with the tip of my pinky tapping, not bracing. Sometimes my pinky obliged; often my magical instructor brought my awareness to my positioning that was far from correct. I keep trying. I tried to write a great novel. But if you could have heard my weekly check-ins with my friend and coach, the talented writer, Lauren Griffey, when I was nearing the midpoint, you’d know that I was so lost and so frustrated and it was so far from great… but I kept writing anyway. When I was 80% of the way through the draft, the story broke. I knew the mountainous rewrite that would be required, but I also knew that I would complete the draft. Because I wasn’t trying to make it perfect; I was practicing showing up every day, inspired or not, to put in the pages.
I didn’t cross-stitch the monochromatic piece I’d alluded to in my prologue, where I dreamed of ‘creating instead of consuming.’ Instead, I wrote, I namasted, I played an instrument, and I dreamed up new services, creating albums out of your crumbly kid art and your niche photo collections.
Ann Patchett promised me Time, and I got it. Yes, I shopped more than I aimed to. I wasn’t perfect. But I kept trying. I kept practicing. And I got so much more than could ever fit in a shopping cart.
