My Shopaholic Confession

Hi my name is Annabel and I’m a Shopaholic!

No, I wasn’t born this way. In fact, no one from my family tree possesses a shopaholic gene so it can’t be a hereditary thing. I guess it was more of a “learned response”. When you are living in a place where fashion is king, you just can’t fight it. You have to adapt to it, almost like a survival instinct.

The year was 2002. Barely 4 months fresh out from college, I found my 1^st job. Well, it wasn’t exactly my dream job but hey, how can I complain when I was earning my own money… my own crispy Hong Kong money. Oh yes, you could definitely say I was a lucky girl back then. Imagine being 21, earning your own keeps, and living in a country where shopping is said to be a national past time. But who would have known, it was also the perfect recipe that would quickly turn me into a shopaholic.

Living in the Hong Kong, where one is sure to have a daily dose of Armani clad investment bankers, cute boy-candy in their Calvins, girls strutting their Jimmy Choo with their dearest Gucci bags, it is so hard not to get caught with the fashion label bug because donning a designer piece is like the secret handshake for them. I myself was unable to fight the bug that soon enough I was also completely under the influence of “LABELS”—the six letter darnest word ever created.

I remember the first time my colleagues and I went shopping, I spend half of my paycheck just on one shop. The feeling of being able to purchase something so beautiful from my own money overcame me that I bought whatever pleased my eyes. But everything inside the shop was so beautiful. In a span of four months, I almost bought half of what was inside the shop. Worst, I was still not satisfied. Soon, I began to expand my shopping territory. During lunch break I would quickly go down our building to check the latest displays around the neighborhood. I would patiently walk from window to window and decide which one I will buy later after work. Whenever there was a sale, I would drag my colleagues to join me in a shopping frenzy (or was it the other way around? It really doesn’t matter). And when my credit card application was finally approved, I took my shopping experience to a new level. The internet became my next best friend. If I wasn’t outside the house checking on the latest trends, I was inside the house surfing the net for the hottest items. I became a certified shopaholic.

That was how things were for a while. My credit card was almost maxed out and my savings was close to nil. At home I have a chunk load of stuffs overflowing from my tiny closet. It was then that I realized how my lifestyle was unhealthy for me and decided to take some action. It definitely took a lot of will power to control my impulses but I learned a lot from that experience.

Now that I am older (ahem), wiser (ahem ahem), and has more responsibility (this one is definitely true), I am still battling with my shopaholic tendencies. But I can say that I am a more judicious shopper now.

Catch "Confessions of a Shopaholic" in Cinemas on February 18, 2009!