Therapeutic value

For the past couple of days I have been rather upset, with no real reason to be except perhaps a slight twinge of the ego. It happens to spoiled brats like me when they don’t get what they want, which is sometimes the case – not often, but enough to make the mien peevish and childishly bad-tempered. The mood soon passes, but while it is present, coloured somewhat by external issues such as PMS, boredom and the inability to vent satisfactorily (throw a vase, slug a man, write a viciously rude editorial), the urge is to be totally non-productive, yell at your best friend and, more often than not, shop.

When my pet died a few years ago I went through many months of retail therapy, stocking up relentlessly and unthinkingly on clothes, bags and assorted rubbish that had no earthly use or reason to be in my life, but I never managed to forget how his little heart stopped as I held him. When my mother died, it was a burning need to refurbish the house, adding all the bits and pieces that she never got around to doing but had always said she would like as part of the apartment and its decor. And when dreams come to a sudden and strident halt, I have usually found myself looking for chocolate, for shoes, for diamonds…for whatever will give me the feeling that I have the power to acquire for myself what someone else has been unable or unwilling to give me.

This time, for a dream that was, rationally speaking, not really what I wanted, I felt a dip of my generally happy and positive mood that was, to me, more upsetting because of its irrationality than because of the cause of it. I had wanted something for its prestige value, not the satisfaction it would have given me, or the joy I would have found in doing whatever it entailed. Which was a good reason not to get it, I tell myself, even as my black mood fades into a more lively and bright silver. This time, my therapy came not from buying, which is easy to do and impossible to store, but from the logic that it was ego that was hurt, not my career or my face value. My image of myself as bright, good-to-look-at and capable was slightly dented, for a short while, and has now almost been smoothed back to happy sanity.

But the urge to go out there and shop has not faded. I want to buy shoes – but is that unusual for me? I always want to buy shoes because, like almost every woman and many men that I know, I have a lot, but nothing is just right for that particular outfit that I want so much to wear for that particular occasion! I want to buy the new line of designer towels that I have been seeing advertised all over – but then, every time I do a large load of laundry on Sunday, I grouch about towels that are getting thready and linen that should have been consigned to the quilting bee histories ago. I want to buy chocolate – but I always do, since I can never have enough of the sweet brown stuff!

So why do I want to indulge in some retail therapy now? Or do I? If I do shop, it will probably be for groceries, cat food, T-shirts to replace my father’s admittedly disgraceful collection, carpets, towels, home accessories….none of which will kill that niggling peeve that I have in me. But hang on a wee moment – where did it go? It was here just this morning….!