Day Two
I managed to make it through Monday without buying anything! I joke, but really, I'm beginning to get a sense of how stupidly hard this is going to be. My brain is hardwired into associating new stuff with success, and therefore, no matter how ridiculous this might be, buying stuff makes me feel like a winner.
Which is dumb. New shoes are not going to make me a different person. I am not what I wear.
This might all sound like a cross between some horrible chick lit novel and Tyler Durden's anti-consumerist rants in Fight Club, but I hope it will help to examine the way I think and pull it apart, showing it to my conscious self as the crap it really is.
I fully intend to keep a diary of my progress in my Livejournal (and therefore, a syndicated diary through my Facebook). I hope that through this, I will be able to look back on this experiment and learn from it.
Considering I last went shopping on Saturday, I next thought about something I wanted, and usually would have made a note to buy, on Monday. I was wearing my hair down and sort-of-curly (I sleep with it rolled up so it's a false kind of curly when I wake up, on nights when I can't be bothered to blow-dry my hair before bed) with part of it pinned behind my ear on one side with a nice kirby grip with a daisy on that I found in my draw. I liked it, so I made a mental note to buy more pretty decorated kirby grips.
This was the point that I caught myself doing it. Whereas sometimes I'll stop myself thinking, "ugh, you don't have any money" this time I actually thought "you don't need that!" and I felt a bit ridiculous for having made a conscious decision to buy something I didn't really need.
A quick rummage through my draw turned up the partner to the daisy grip, plus a couple of gold coloured slides and a flat hair clip. Which is plenty, really. Plus a hell of a load of plain brown bobby pins which could be easily embellished if I so wished. I do own a lot of buttons and odds and ends of material, so it would be fairly easy to manufacture something new if I really needed to.
I made it a day before I wanted to buy something. This, sadly, hasn't really surprised me.
I also saw a sewing machine in Woolworths for £49 today. I want to spend some of my Christmas money (ostensibly already spent on crap I don't need, really) on this. The money was intended for my new computer fund, but since I got him some new RAM and a new hardrive (or rather, my Dad kindly did for Christmas), Hodges-the-laptop has been running beautifully, and I haven't had any of the annoying problems that were making me desperate for a replacement in the first place. But I kind of feel like this would be giving in. Despite the vow only excluding clothes, shoes and jewellery, to spend any money on something that isn't a necessity smacks of failure.
But on the other hand, a sewing machine is an investment, and not excluded by my terms. And it might also make not buying clothes easier to handle if I can make my own with some cheap, market-bought material.
Hmm.
Which is dumb. New shoes are not going to make me a different person. I am not what I wear.
This might all sound like a cross between some horrible chick lit novel and Tyler Durden's anti-consumerist rants in Fight Club, but I hope it will help to examine the way I think and pull it apart, showing it to my conscious self as the crap it really is.
I fully intend to keep a diary of my progress in my Livejournal (and therefore, a syndicated diary through my Facebook). I hope that through this, I will be able to look back on this experiment and learn from it.
Considering I last went shopping on Saturday, I next thought about something I wanted, and usually would have made a note to buy, on Monday. I was wearing my hair down and sort-of-curly (I sleep with it rolled up so it's a false kind of curly when I wake up, on nights when I can't be bothered to blow-dry my hair before bed) with part of it pinned behind my ear on one side with a nice kirby grip with a daisy on that I found in my draw. I liked it, so I made a mental note to buy more pretty decorated kirby grips.
This was the point that I caught myself doing it. Whereas sometimes I'll stop myself thinking, "ugh, you don't have any money" this time I actually thought "you don't need that!" and I felt a bit ridiculous for having made a conscious decision to buy something I didn't really need.
A quick rummage through my draw turned up the partner to the daisy grip, plus a couple of gold coloured slides and a flat hair clip. Which is plenty, really. Plus a hell of a load of plain brown bobby pins which could be easily embellished if I so wished. I do own a lot of buttons and odds and ends of material, so it would be fairly easy to manufacture something new if I really needed to.
I made it a day before I wanted to buy something. This, sadly, hasn't really surprised me.
I also saw a sewing machine in Woolworths for £49 today. I want to spend some of my Christmas money (ostensibly already spent on crap I don't need, really) on this. The money was intended for my new computer fund, but since I got him some new RAM and a new hardrive (or rather, my Dad kindly did for Christmas), Hodges-the-laptop has been running beautifully, and I haven't had any of the annoying problems that were making me desperate for a replacement in the first place. But I kind of feel like this would be giving in. Despite the vow only excluding clothes, shoes and jewellery, to spend any money on something that isn't a necessity smacks of failure.
But on the other hand, a sewing machine is an investment, and not excluded by my terms. And it might also make not buying clothes easier to handle if I can make my own with some cheap, market-bought material.
Hmm.