The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy In A Store by Cait Flanders Audio Book: 5 hours, 30 mins
Cait Flanders has had her issues with OCDC. She has been an alcoholic, an imbiber in pharmaceuticals that had addictive tendencies, binged on food, couldn’t hold onto a loving relationship and comfort shopped when life got too overwhelming until one day she came to that point where she stopped. It took a long time to get sober, it took a long time to give up the party-girl scene, it was no picnic –pun intended- giving up eating voraciously to comfort the feelings of low self-esteem, she is still meandering through the relationship swirl tending toward the, you know, I think I’m o.k. alone mindset, but, shopping was still her go to form of self-preservation when her feelings became too much to bear like when her Mother and Step-Dad who raised her after her real Dad split and oh yeah when the jerk resurfaces during her childhood creates a horrible fiasco –must read sequence here – the Step-Dad who became her real father figure for life- when he and her mother divorce she had a major melt down, and when her romantic relationships broke up – she couldn’t deal with the grief of lost love and all the one days she dreamt of, anxiety attacks a plenty hit her like a brick wall falling on top of her. Trying not to find solace in drink, trying very hard to stay with her newly vegetarian lifestyle and exercise regime, no longer looking to drugs as her retreat of choice she instead of those bad choices did what she thought was the best of the worst and comfort in shopping. She reasoned if she treated herself to something it would give her a sense of her own worth again, afterall she just experienced another let down, another disappointment another tragedy wouldn’t buying something new cheer her up and take her mind off of it? Yeah, that momentary adrenaline rush of the chase until the bills came in and she realized she was over $30,000 in debt. She shares with the reader and her followers on her blog her journey to learn how to be enough without all the trappings and crutches. How to rise up out of the despair pit in positive ways that would serve her instead of like after a sugar high dropping back to the low energy, depression she had been in. She could sink or she could swim and it was a very easy road to sink afterall she had drawn her own map on that one over the years. She decided to come up for air, survey her surroundings and pull herself out of the funk and do right by herself. She set a goal to spend as little as possible for one year to get her finances back in order. She job hopped a lot until she ended up with a successful blog that would support her needs comfortably. She found out all the stuff she was buying she seldom really honestly needed. She decided to kill the impulse buying trigger by getting rid of her cable t.v. – no marketing to her subconscious to buy their products on the commercials or stuff she saw in the t.v. shows she had been watching. She unsubscribed from every coupon site and every retail site she was constantly getting bombarded with MUST HAVE sale ads. She kept her airline sites only because she continued to travel on the savings she had by cutting down about half of her expenditures by not shopping. She also decided to cut down on the stuff she owned, had bought that still had the tags on, etc. Returned anything she could, sold anything she really didn’t need or want and either tossed or donated a load of stuff in her home and closets that held no real reason to keep. She even moved from a house that was way bigger than what she actually required and moved to an apartment thereby causing the need for more paring down – no longer did she have the space to stockpile stuff. She even did a check on herself to inventory what she spent on what items and how many times in the year she replenished her stock. Formerly she felt the need to always keep a stash of extra toiletries, cleaning products, food which took up much space, and often expired before she could get the benefit of it. She loved numbers so working through keeping track of how many bottles of shampoo she used in a year and making spreadsheets was very revealing. It gave her a new eye to see what she really needed and what she thought she had needed. She got serious about revamping her lifestyle and has never gone back. Her blog keeps her in touch with her followers who cheer her on and being in charge of her blog when she starts getting backlash from haters and naysayers, she can delete the negativity, though, she keeps the differences of opinions which make her think. Everyone has an opinion but the ones who want to argue just for arguments sake or call her names or try to destroy what she has built for herself – who needs that? So bye bye meanies. She speaks in all honesty and tells stories on herself that made me say, “Girl! What were you thinking. The road out of the dark tunnel has been a long one for her, but, now that she has gone through it she wants to help others. Her story is inspiring and positive and I really enjoyed this book. I would definetly recommend it.
No comments:
Post a Comment