I’ve always challenged myself for Lent. For those who are unfamiliar Lent is when you give up something for 40 days and 40 nights. Starting from Ash Wednesday up until Easter you abstain from the one thing (or things for the overly ambitious) of your choosing. The symbolism is to honor Jesus’ 40 day bid in the desert when he had to fight the Devil’s tempting offers and attempt to break his will.
Now, Lent is supposed to be about sacrifice and giving up something substantial and/or something that is causing a lot of “noise” in your life. When this year came I felt like I didn’t quite know what I wanted to sacrifice…Then the priest preached about what Lent really meant, and got me to thinking. The gist of his sermon was that we can’t give up something that does absolutely nothing to us. Sacrifice shouldn’t be a matter of convenience. So the priest’s preaching really got me thinking….The ultimate challenge for me was shopping.
I was doing great as a recovering shopaholic. Until I decided to move to Dallas – and shit starting hitting the fan. It also didn’t help that I got approved for a bunch of different credit cards. Walmart, Victoria’s Secret, Kohl’s, and Macy’s. A recipe for disaster. On a daily basis pre-Lent I had at least 20 email messages (at minimum) from different stores, shops, and retail sites about sales, free shipping, new arrivals, and all that. You named it, I was getting it. Never mind the fact that I was going to the mall to de-stress and cope whenever I felt unhappy, sad, depressed, bored, and lonely. All these feelings became interchangeable to ‘happy!’ with the swipe of that magic magnetic strip. But it wasn’t solving anything. In fact it was magnifying the problem that people with a lot of shit have – and all my lady shopper friends and male clothes whores know this phenomenon. Where in the hell am I going to put ALLADIS? I had (once upon a time) an 864 sq. ft. 1 bedroom in Dallas with tons of closet space, but with shoes, clothes, and bags in the closet, underneath the bed, in my bathroom closet, and in my front closets – it was getting to be much.
And so I gave up shopping for Lent. Truth be told this was hard at first because I could only buy food, gas, and items for my jewelry business. That. Was. It. Normally when I do these Lenten things I am sure to maintain the same lifestyle so as to be authentic in the sacrifice because temptation exists and that’s the point. But because shopping had taken up so much noise in my daily life, I just had to get some clarity from it all...
I stopped wasting my gas going to the mall for no damn reason at all really –truth be told it wasn’t even the place to find cute guys and if that’s not happening – all is lost on a mall stroll and you just end up getting aggravated by the hodge-podge of rude children, families, long lines, slow walkers, and crowded escalators. I unsubscribed from a bunch of sites to clear my damn inbox. These stores were sending me emails twice a day. If I was naïve, thought I had no friends, and had a man my perception of constant communication might have been skewed based on how much attention these stores were hitting me with compared to my actual person-to-person email ratio. And then, I took the real plunge and looked at my damn credit card bills. DAMN. Not only did I not have the space in my closet or drawers for all the shit I was being told to buy, I didn’t even have a fly coming out my wallet with all the money I owed and had to pay to these people.
About halfway into the kamikaze ANTI shopping mode, I started window shopping to go into full throttle temptation mode. I didn’t flake! Now that Easter has come and gone I can shop again. Funny thing is… I don’t even have the urge to. I have so many tags to pop, that for my upcoming trip to NY for a family function all I had to do was go into my closet and pull a brand new dress and brand new/old (I bought them on sale 2 years ago and never wore them) shoes. I also have a nice plan on how to eradicate this credit card debt I’ve accumulated in my times of chagrin, homesickness, loneliness, and unhappiness and the thought of that makes me happier than any pair of shoes at the moment.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am STILL materialistic. And I like things... but I think I’ve pulled the reigns in on discipline and realizing that I have enough things for now. In this culture everything is NEVER good enough. It has to be the newest colors of the season, the latest style of jeans, the newest car, the next phone, etc. When it comes to fashion nothing is new. In saving some of the jeans I’ve had since 2005, they’ve come back in style in 2011. Who would’ve thunk it? I’m trying to own my car outright, so I’m not trading up because if I had no car note life would be GRAND. I don’t even have enough places to go to wear half the things I STILL haven’t worn yet! In Dallas, dressing up is a matter of opinion and then occasion. Coming from Brooklyn, stuntin is a habit so I’ma be alright…and when I think back I've always been good and THEN SOME (for those that know about my shoe game yall feel me ;-)
And although I hate to get all churchy on yall, this gospel reading right before Lent started made it crystal clear to me what it is (I put bits and pieces but the entire chapter/verse is cited):
Matthew 6:24-34
"Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?..... Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span? Why are you anxious about clothes? Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin....Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides...."
Truer words never spoken....I think the most important thing that I learned in my shopping sacrifice is clarity. My focus on things and the noise from all of that was getting in the way of my progress financially and emotionally. I also know that I’m in a much better place than I was when the shopping tirade was going on, so that eases the ego check when I think I may want that.
So even though the purse strings are officially off my wallet, I think I’m good for quite a while on buying just for the sake of buying, transforming a want into a dire ‘need’ and most of all I’m content with making my current wardrobe ::RuPaul voice:: “Work bitches!”
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