Shopping Therapy

If I'm being honest, I'm not at all where I want to be with my spending. If I'm being brutally honest my progress is marginal more often than not. Because where I want to be is spending $0 and saving infinity dollars.  

From the end of November through mid-February I was on a No-Buy and doing really well. Feeling good emotionally, mentally, physically. I thought this would be the time I kicked the habit. Then a close family member had a serious medical emergency and I had to take the lead.  

Quite frankly, I handled the emergency portion like a champ. All day. And the following days. Then when the chaos settled, I fell off the sobriety wagon, hard. The worst thing is that I actually realized I was using shopping to cope pretty early on. But I didn't stop. 

 A few hours bled over to the next day, turned into a daily thing, turned into purchases, turned into months now of repeated behavior and I am right back where I don't want to be. The good news for the blog is that I have lots of stuff to post photos of. The bad news is...you know, all the rest of it. 

 I could really sink here, just spiral down, but I would rather not. I'd rather just be OK with it.  Life happened; I coped. As far as copes go, it's not the worst habit in the world and maybe my journey needs to be on a spectrum from doing well at saving to spending extravagantly rather than seeing it as an on/off switch.  

While I am on an honesty streak, I also have to admit that as a perfectionist, I will probably never live up to my own expectations if I don't lower them just scooch or two below "practically perfect in everyway," and aim more for "I'm doing my best, honey."  I'm human and the best way to reach any destination is to just keep going, so I will and I do.  And in the spirit of transparency, it hasn't been all setbacks.  I've had a few victories too and I'll share those in my next post.