Forged in Retail
It’s nature plus nurture, it’s genes expressing themselves within a particular environment, it’s ending up like your parents. We’ve both got something that’s gone wrong with our heads, my mom and I, and have each shuffled through several medications to squash it, whatever it is (something on the bipolar spectrum). In the meantime, something must be done to have a reasonably good time.
My mom taught me to shop.
Shopping takes the down mood and turns it around, initially … a little bit. All our trips to the mall together, to buy me school clothes? A little grim for me, because I always felt guilty over making my mom spend all this money, and I was something of a preppy little shit, and my mom must have broken the budget a few times to keep me in Alexander Julian. But for both of us, a chance to get outside our selves for a while, to stop being so quiet all the time, and to engage in the world. Left to our own devices, we’d be holed up somewhere in the house with our books. (but these were the days before Amazon, so we did have to actually go out to buy books.)
Some of my fondest memories are of going out to eat at any restaurant connected to a mall, with my mom and stepfather, bringing along a book because when you’re 11, your parents are boring when compared with reading The Sword of Shannara series. After dinner, we’d shop a little, wander the lanes of the mall. Bookstores, computer software stores. These were formative times. I was forged in retail. And so I have trouble understanding people who don’t like to shop. Shopping is sanity!
And it just happens to be something I’m impelled to do when I’m hypomanic, which I’m starting to be again, after about a month of lows and exhaustion. I’m waking up early again, usually around 4am. I find myself opening up Amazon just to see what they’ve recommended to me. (Always either something I already have, or something so close to it I don’t know why they think I’d buy the blue one, too.)
I used to get spendy only at the end of a freelance assignment. I thought back then it was leaving the job, and the fun of knowing it had been a job well done, that triggered the money spending. Now, looking back through these manic-depressive glasses, I can see that finishing a stressful assignment and heading off into the land called freelancer’s vacation (unemployment) triggered hypomania. Never knew what it was at the time, and had I been in therapy – and had a good shrink – I would have recognized what my up times and their split decisions were about, and my life might have turned out very very differently. But that’s for another post.
Happy end-of-January.



