... and I do like a challenge.
From the low-carb challenge (the diabetes doctor told me it wasn't sustainable - I managed 15 months and only stopped to modify it slightly when I became pregnant), to the "week's holiday to attend a wedding with only 5kg of hand luggage" challenge and probably more that I'm too embarrassed to remember.
I've always struggled with shopping, particularly clothes. I think it started when I was a student, I had a job, so I had money to spend how I liked. I always preferred shopping to drinking - but in 1990s Newcastle you didn't tend to need much cash to have a good night - so that's where most of my money went. And almost 20 years later, this has carried on.
During my times of depression, I always knew it was serious when "the shopping didn't help" - when buying something lovely or, even better, a complete bargain! didn't lift my mood. That's when I knew that I needed more intervention - either self-motivated or drugs (legal ones, obviously). I shop when I'm happy, I shop when I'm not, but I shop, therefore I am.
The website "recovering shopaholic" has some interesting perspectives on why people like me shop here. I'm not sure which (if any) apply to me, I'm not sure if I really want to self-examine that much, but it's time to do something about it.
I really don't want to attempt to add up how much I've spent over the years on clothes. More clothes than I really need. I've lost count how many clothes I've sent off to the charity shop still with their labels on, because they either didn't fit (and I never quite got around to taking them back for a refund - or of course I kept that because I'd soon have lost enough weight to fit into them, right?), because I bought them on impulse and never found the occasion to wear them, or - the worst - because they were a "bargain", no other reason. On top of this, my weight has fluctuated considerably over the years - I bought into the idea that once clothes become too big you throw them away, to avoid the temptation of putting the weight back on... Big mistake. Big credit card bill when it came to replacing them.
So this is the year of the clothes. I've been through my wardrobe and taken out clothes that don't fit. I've filled bags labelled with the size of the clothes and put them in the loft. I've gone through the remaining clothes and taken out those which are the wrong colour for me (according to the colour people, I'm an autumn - maybe a warm autumn, maybe a deep autumn, they couldn't decide) so, with the exception of some of my favourite black clothes, out they went. Then went the styles that don't suit me - the round-neck tops, the trousers that make legs over a size 10 look like parsnips, the short tops and jackets, etc etc. All good.
Except it wasn't. Because I had a mish-mash of clothes - a huge number of cream coloured cardigans/jackets (why?) - and nothing really fits together. So I went shopping again.
It took my "week's holiday to attend a wedding with only 5kg of hand luggage" challenge to make me really that I just had too much, way more than I needed, so I'm doing the next step, the Project 333 challenge.
The Project 333 challenge is basically living with only 33 items of clothing for 3 months. If done rigidly, this includes shoes (pairs, not individually), jewellery, accessories and of course clothes. It doesn't include underwear, gym clothes (!) or nightwear. It's a minimalist fashion challenge that is so far opposed to anything I've ever done before, but that's got to be good, right?
So that's what I'm doing. From 1st July to 30th September. It's going to be a long three months.
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