structuring my life around the mundane

Sometime toward the middle of quarantine 2020, I got really obsessed with buying shit on Amazon. A lot of shit.

As I type this, I just went through a mass unpacking because I got anxiety about actually opening the shit I bought. There’s a desk organizer, a pencil sharpener, a laundry bin, a notebook crate, a camera tripod, a Roomba (I’ve been too lazy to open it, omg it’s been a month), and a few plant pots.

I’d gone through most of my life not using Prime, but when Mom handed over the logins to our family account, I found myself sucked in. Suddenly, I was spending all of my minimal earnings from my new full time job as a tarot reader.

And man, I’d never felt so alive.

Because you see, I could suddenly buy things to make my space have a story. Have a personality. Things could make sense in a life that’d rarely felt like it could. Now I could see how essential physicality is for my holistic health, when I’d spent most of my life really uninterested in this aspect.

There was a world of stuff I could buy, and by month 3, the packages were piling up by my door. They were all themed around what you’d probably expect— organization, storage, and decoration. But for me, the fact that my latest improvement project was the space that kept me prisoner was entirely novel. I’d always gone around claiming that, “iT’s WhAt’S iNsIdE tHAt ShOuLd CouNT,” drunk off my Law of Attraction teachings, but suddenly I realized that is not all the way f*cking true. 

For me, indulging in materialism is a really big deal. I’ve never gotten thrills over string lights or fuzzy carpets until now. The extent to which I lived being unintentionally ascetic behooves even me.

There was a time in 2019 where I couldn’t even sustain an appetite because I so believed I didn’t deserve the physical world’s welcoming embrace. I calculated it recently, and I moved 13 locations in 4 years, including 6 different cities in 2. I don’t know what it’s like to live in one place for more than a year — the last time was when I was 18, and my space was nowhere near as messy in high school as it became after I left Oregon. I never felt like I could “unpack” my belongings, and suddenly I had a room in Mid-City LA connected to our unit’s laundry room that could do the trick for me. My current space has been my home since September 2019, but I am only now beginning to embrace feeling wanted by a space.  

It was all part of my grand master plan to hack the codes of happiness and make my daily routine king.

I’m staring at this mess as I type this and feeling really proud, actually, that I’ve bought so many things. I used to cry when my well-to-do dad, who loves all things in this physical realm and spending his engineering salary, would come visit LA. He’d ask me what I wanted him to buy for me, because he’s honestly the most generous man I’ve ever known. The most expensive dinners, the best jewelry, the latest technology, he’d boast. In China, when you have money, you flaunt it and you try to spoil your children, especially if you genuinely get along with them. Tell me, and I’ll get it for you!

I’d stutter awkwardly and mumble some joke that what I really wanted, if he really wanted to know, was to not be depressed, or to feel like I had nothing to prove, or to stop worrying what some boy thought of me. He’d be disappointed we couldn’t bond about anything we both owned or could lay our eyes on in the physical world.

But suddenly, I had things to actually discuss with my parents. They could give me recommendations for kitchenware I never thought to use, or suggest a way to maximize my bathroom counter space. Worrying about these things had always felt like a luxury. But now I realized, my definition of luxury still had to be adopted, just as others might view worrying about mental and spiritual health as a luxury in the same vein. 

For me, buying stuff was one of the most formative experiences of my year.

Not starting my own business, not my first pseudo-relationship, not staying indoors all the time. No, this year was the year I decided that my biggest goals in life would be going to bed at a decent hour and eating 3 meals a day. Thanking the body that’s kept me alive enough to inspire people out of being stuck in theirs. 

I already have so much of the more ~ abstract ~ parts of life figured out, but I have never known what it’s like to move so slowly that I’d have to pay attention to the space in which I’m existing. I can easily meditate and get interesting visions — but sitting in my room and scanning my possessions without guilt and anxiety trapping me in hell has been a commonplace experience since I was 18. 

Ever since I said NO MORE, BITCH in 2020 and started keeping a water consumption log and sleep log (deviation actually can be tracked rather easily for me now…), I’ve noticed it gives me different insights. When I’m stressed now, I try to get to a mentally stable place for long enough to clean my room as my first order of business, rather than swim in the analyzations I always reach for. Setting my boundaries to revolve specifically around my physical body and my limitations and making those the all time most important parts of my life improved my day to day life. And somewhere within that, I decided the only way to achieve a godliness around my everyday life was to buy shit until it felt like I deserved to prioritize that.

I doubt it’s a sustainable practice, and I’m sure I’ll eventually run out of things to buy. but I’m arrogant enough to try to tell myself I deserve it. By day, I coach people through their deepest traumas and suggest new ways of looking at intuition and the spiritual realm. I’ve been doing this since even before I was paid to — by sophomore year of college, I’d acquired 3 tarot decks and spent my time analyzing the tenets of the past and the future and theorizing about society with my best friend. My life as a voice of astrology, tarot, and MBTI is “really cool,” according to my neurotypical little sister who recently converted to my way of life from finding the Gen Z versions of me on Tik Tok. 

But by night, I’ve always resented how I need so much more out of life to be happy. I’ve felt yanked out of my body by the requirements of the intuitive realm, and now it’s time to come back to it. And I’ve found it through consuming a lot of media observing the people who find an ease in personal style and home decor… people who’ve built their entire careers around the philosophy of it too… that’s really cool to me.

My ability to be a real person and worry about shit I’d forgone in order to justify why reading between the lines should be a way of life — well, let’s just say that Amazon is supposed to showcase that, symbolically?

With Amazon, I can participate in an aspect of the human experience and stop making lame excuses for ‘not belonging’ — I can look at this website full of things everyone needs (or think they need) and feel the same hunger arise within me that millions could relate to. It’s a lot harder to find your circle of friends who think ego death and stoicism is the most interesting pastime. But every time I buy something new (even if yes, I do return a lot of it), it feels like I have a resting spot from life feeling like a battlefield.

And you know what, I do deserve to remember this feeling. Shopping isn’t always the healthiest form of self care, but meditating upon its implications and acting upon them? I’ll take that for $29.99.