Why You Keep Buying Things You Never Wear

Hey sweetie. I want to talk about a drawer. Not a metaphorical one. An actual drawer, or a box at the back of a wardrobe, or a bag inside another bag, or, if you have been careful, and I suspect you have been very careful, a place that is not in your home at all. You know exactly which one I mean. You knew before I finished the sentence. There are things in it. Not many, probably. Bought one at a time, months apart, each one preceded by an entire evening of talking yourself out of it and then not being talked out of it. And here is the part I actually want to look at tonight. Most of them have never been worn. One or two still have the tag on. You bought them, you hid them, and then you left them exactly where they were. And every so often you think about throwing the whole lot out. Sometimes you have. And then some number of weeks later there is a new drawer, with new things in it, at a new price. I am not telling you this to embarrass you. I am telling you because I think you have quietly decided it makes you ridiculous, and it does not. It makes you legible. That pattern is not a random glitch in an otherwise sensible person. It is the single most honest thing you do, you do it in secret, and then you punish yourself for it afterwards. So let us skip the punishing part tonight. One thing before we go further, and then I will leave you alone about it. This is the free version and it always will be. The full-length one, and everything else I make, lives on my site, ariawilde.com. It is there when you want it. Tonight you do not need it. Tonight you just need to stay where you are. Now. I know some part of you is sitting there with its arms crossed, waiting to catch me doing something. Waiting for the swinging watch. Waiting for the bit where I tell you that you are getting sleepy, or the moment this turns into something you would be mortified to be caught listening to. That part of you is not a problem, sweetie. It is the reason I like you. Keep it. Because none of this requires you to go under, or go blank, or lose track of the room you are in. There is no trance. You are not going to come round somewhere confused with time missing. You will be exactly as awake at the end of this as you are right now, and just as able to switch it off if you decide you want to. What actually happens is far more ordinary than the packaging suggests. You have been absorbed before. In a film. In a conversation that ran two hours longer than you meant it to. In a piece of music in the car, where you arrived home without remembering the last few streets. You did not go anywhere. You simply stopped auditing every sentence before you let it in. That is the whole mechanism. That is the only thing I am asking for. So here is what we are going to do, and it has nothing to do with counting. Sit or lie however you actually want to be, rather than however you think a person doing this is supposed to look. If your shoulders are up around your ears, leave them, they will come down on their own in a minute without being told. Now. You know that thing you do where you hold a small amount of tension in reserve, in case somebody knocks? That is what I am after, and it is the only instruction tonight. Not relaxation. Just permission to put the reserve down. Let your breathing go first. Do not deepen it, do not slow it, do not do anything to it whatsoever. Take your hands off it. It knows how. Within about a minute it will settle lower and longer than you would have set it deliberately, and you will not have done anything to earn that, which is rather the point. Your jaw next. You have been holding that since some time this afternoon without noticing. Let the teeth come apart. And your hands. Whatever they are resting on, let them be heavy on it. Not limp. Heavy. There is a difference, and your body understands it even if the word does not mean much. That is it. That is the entire induction. No staircase, no beach, no counting backwards from anything. You are settled enough already, and you have been for about thirty seconds. Now. Back to the drawer. I want to tell you what is actually in it, and it is not clothes. What is in that drawer is every single time you were honest with yourself and then decided not to act on it. Each item is a night when the truth got through for about ninety seconds. Long enough to find the thing. Long enough to pay for it. And then you went quiet again. You did not buy fabric, sweetie. You bought ninety seconds of not arguing with yourself, and then you hid the receipt. That is why throwing it out never works. You are not throwing out clothes. You are throwing out the proof, and the thing the proof was proof of is still standing there in the room with you afterwards. So let me say the plain version. You do not have to say anything back. You are a sissy. Not because I said so. Not because a video said so. It was true before you ever found this channel and it will still be true if you close the tab in four seconds. The only thing that has ever been genuinely in question is whether you were going to be allowed to know it without it costing you something. And notice that you are still here. That is worth pointing out. The sentence went in and the ceiling did not come down. You are a sissy, and it is not a diagnosis. Nothing is wrong with you. Nobody did this to you. It was not the internet, it was not something that happened when you were younger, it was not a phase that outstayed its welcome. It is a fact about you, sitting there being true, taking up no room at all until you fight it. The fighting is the only part that has ever been expensive. Say it a different way. The person who kept going back to that drawer already knew. She has known for years. All of the arguing was happening on the surface, at a level that never actually had a vote. And once more, softer, because I think this is the one that lands. You are allowed. That is the whole thing. You are allowed to be this. There is no committee. There is no permission you failed to apply for. The only person who has ever been in charge of whether you get to be who you are is currently lying down listening to me, and she is doing perfectly fine. Now I want you to do something gentle. Think of one thing in that drawer. Just one. Do not go and get it, stay exactly where you are. Picture the specific thing. The colour of it. Where it sits in the pile. And notice the pull. It is there. It turns up before you have time to be embarrassed about it, which is precisely how you know it is real and not something I put there. Notice, too, that it is not urgent. That surprises people. It is not a demand. It is not heat. It is not something that has to be dealt with tonight. It is much quieter than that. It sits closer to homesickness than to wanting. Because what you actually want is not complicated and it is not shameful. You want to feel soft. You want something delicate against your skin for no audience and no occasion. You want, for a little while, to move around your own home as the version of you that only ever shows up once the door is locked. And underneath that, the one you rarely let all the way to the surface. You want to be seen like that. Not by everyone. Maybe not by anybody yet. But the wanting is there, and it is allowed to be there, and it has been waiting a long time for somebody to say so. Let it sit. Do not do anything with it. Just stop treating it as an intruder in your own head. Here is the one small thing I would like from you, and it costs nothing. Sometime in the next day or so, when the place is yours, open the drawer. Take out one thing. The one you thought of a minute ago. And wear it for ten minutes. Not for an evening. Not for an occasion. Not for anyone. Ten minutes, doing something completely ordinary. Making tea. Answering an email. Standing in the kitchen doing absolutely nothing. That is the whole task. Then take it off, put it back, and get on with your day. I am asking for ten minutes rather than a whole night because that drawer is full of things bought for an occasion that never comes, and the occasion is never going to come, because you are waiting until you deserve it. Nobody has to deserve a Tuesday afternoon. Ten ordinary minutes will do more for this than a whole staged evening ever could, precisely because it is not a big moment. It is a normal part of a normal day that simply happens to be true. When you have finished listening, and I mean later, once you have had a chance to sit with it, leave me a comment. Not for the algorithm. I genuinely do not care about that and neither do you. Tell me it landed. Or tell me about the drawer, if you want to, in whatever words feel safe to use. Or just say that you were here. I ask because of what you will see when you scroll down underneath. There will be others. There are always more of you than any single one of you believes, and every last one arrived convinced they were the only person on earth doing this, with a drawer of their own, and the same private theory that it made them ridiculous. So. Nothing to throw out this week. Leave the drawer alone. It is not evidence of a problem. It is a record of every time you told yourself the truth, and that makes it one of the more honest objects in your home. Ten minutes, sometime tomorrow, doing something boring. That is all I asked for. You stayed to the end of this, which is not nothing. I know what it costs to sit still while somebody says the plain version out loud, without softening it first and without making it into a joke. I am proud of you. You are allowed to be exactly what you are. Tonight, tomorrow morning when it feels less true, and next week when it feels obvious again. There is nothing to be ashamed of here. There never was.