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February 13, 2009What is wrong with me?Why can’t I stop looking at these shoes?I NEED AN INTERVENTION!I have a fetish for casually searching EBay for shoes, every now and then. I find it relaxing. My feet could have made the mold for Size 7M. Virtually any manifestation of the type will fit me. It’s the same treasure hunting impulse that keeps me turning into thrift shops even though my three closets are packed with great buys I could, mathematically, wear in enough combinations to last the rest of my life without repeating an outfit. You just never know what you’ll find. And I have already filled to capacity my Container Store 36-pair over-the-door shoe rack, with several spare pairs populating the closet floor under the heaps of items I need to fix, iron, get rid of, have no room for. The rule is, if I buy one new piece of clothes, I have to move two out. If I move new shoes in, I have to move old ones out. That’s OK. Novelty adds luster to the new stuff. Rejects from my collection go to friends, the thrift shop or the Junior League consignment shop, where I might garner more than I paid for them, even at 50% of the sale price. I just made bids on a dozen pairs of shoes! I finally lost interest on page 20 of some 50 generated from my search, at 200 pairs per page. So I’ve scrolled through 4,000 pairs of shoes while enjoying a glass of wine with one hand and bidding with the other. And now that I’ve told you that, I deserve an embarrassing secret back from you. If I win all my bids at my bidding prices (ranging from .06 for some black Gladiator sandals to 89.99 for brown Born “Biddy” boots, retail $154, I will have paid an average of 29.16 per pair. Try going to Nordstrum’s with $350 and buying 12 pairs of shoes! Excessive spending is a well-known hallmark of manic behavior. Without notice a spell comes over me, during which I know I will buy myself whatever I want, sometimes not even looking at the prices. Then the spell is broken and I regain my senses with a deflated return to reality, a feeling of empty defeat. WHAT CAN I TELL YOU, IT’S A SICKNESSAs I scan the site, I am watching the Dateline interview with Nadya Suleman, mother of 14 in vitro-conceived children. FREAK! Forget the fertility doctor, revoke the license of the cosmetologist who injected her lips with Jolie No. 5 collagen. Yuck! If ever there was malpractice, that was it. She’s delusional, in my opinion, divorced from reality. She once held a psychiatric technician license, when she herself is a case study. Well she has the same sickness I do—a constant need for more, stemming from a feeling of something being missing, some hole you’re seeking to fill that stays a hole no matter how much, or what, you fill it with. Drugs, booze, possessions, an unholy amount of children. She was an only child longing for more familial connection. My own hole is the same—lack of parental nurturing and support as an infant and child. Lovers and friends can’t fill this black hole of need that will never be satisfied, it just comes with the territory of existing. If you didn’t get the love you needed when you started your life, you might well spend the rest of it wondering, if my parents didn’t love me, why would anyone else? There must be something really wrong with me. As much as you might come to terms with your past and fill your life with satisfying elements, it still feels like a strategic part of the puzzle is missing. But isn’t that boring? Oh boo hoo, my own mother didn’t love me. This month’s first-person feature in Tell It To Someone Who Cares magazine. Well, then tell it to someone you pay to care. Arrested development has got to be the most common complaint in the shrink’s inner sanctum. As far as things go, objects of any kind, I don’t need any more. Then why am I always on the hunt for more? Why am I never satisfied with what I already have? Even after ridding myself of 50% of my stuff when I sold my flat. I’m a treasure hunter, but isn’t there already plenty in my treasure chest? Do I need it spilling over the sides, yo ho ho, like you see in cartoons? But I am nowhere near the collector I used to be. Everywhere I go I see stuff I would have snapped up like a venus fly trap five years ago, stuff I am now completely uninterested in. So I’ve made progress. BUT HAS THE HUMAN RACE?How many people feel complete in themselves? Perhaps you know one of those who is “comfortable in his own skin.” Or one who just has the ego and arrogance to barrel his way through life without self-doubt. What keeps us from fully flowering? A friend has the quotation displayed in his home, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” How many are stopped by fear of failure? Another quote I saw on a poster, “The thing you fear the most—do it.” Quitting my job and selling two homes didn’t take courage. I wasn’t afraid to do it. I was simply protecting my sanity and asserting my right to live the life I want. What is the thing I fear the most? I admit it—failure. Not failure in the world—failing myself. But it’s not that fear that stops me from working consistently, it’s the unpredictability of my own moods and energies. Nevertheless I have set millions of words to paper over a lifetime and am glad I am not doing an academic study of my own work. Too much archive diving. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DOthat you most fear to do? What would happen to your life if you did it? Sometimes a house is not worth renovating. It needs a complete tear-down and rebuild. That happened to me. The house of myself that I lived in, was crumbling. The foundation was faulty, the cost of maintenance too great, it did not nourish and sustain me, it debilitated and drained me of the will to live. My old running buddy from Portland, Tom, is here for a week. He says he tries to keep his problems down to three at a time. Things he has to remedy for his life to run more smoothly. In contemplating this, I determined that I have not a single problem, right now, as of 3:15 a.m. Friday, February 13th, 2009. Down the line I might, but no need to worry about that right now. My life is happening now, and even if I am occasionally not up to the challenge of living it, if I have to draw the covers over my head to recharge and restore my equilibrium, so be it. Small price to pay for the adventure of being a human being on the planet earth. L’Chaim!
The author’s friend Tom on top of the mountain ------------------------------------------------------------ I’ve only so much time
Wait'll you see these shoes! copyright Alexandra Jones 2009 |
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