I Think I Have Been Using Shopping to Feel Briefly More Alive Than My Life Usually Allows

Dear Delyara, Not huge shopping. Not reckless, obvious, cinematic behaviour. Small things. Clicking. Adding to basket. A package arriving. The brief little lift of choosing something, buying something, receiving something, holding something new before the old emotional weather of the day closes back over me again. That is what I’m starting to notice. I tell myself I deserve it, or it’s useful, or it’s not much, or other people do worse, or I’ve had a hard week. Sometimes all of that is true. But there are moments now when I can feel that the buying is not really about the item. It is about interruption. About stimulation. About the feeling of life momentarily arriving from outside with some spark in it. That scares me. Because I know how easy it is for relief to become ritual. And ritual to become dependency. And dependency to become a quiet way of surviving a life that has not been soft enough in the right places. I do not want to build little addictions around my own emptiness. Still, I think I already have in some ways.