My Obsession with USED

Thrift has been a part of my life for a long time. I was always the recycler in the family. I think I lived in San Diego during a drought at just the right time developmentally, and in the early nineties, recycling got a lot of hype. I was hooked. It was perfect for my little anxious brain. I could focus on the little details, the not throwing away. It was good for my little wounded soul.

And tapping into that child part of me has been really good too. I get how my soul is fed, as strange as it is. It could be worse, of course; my soul could be fed by spiders or something else really weird.

But now, I can't live that way all the time. I can't live on the fringes like that. I need to be more stable. I can't work so hard to clothe and feed myself, not when the rest of the world expects those things to be less difficult. I can't be simultaneously in relationship and always doing my own thing.

This is why I have a new bed, and a new mattress, and other new things in my apartment this week; not because they're better, but because sometimes it's more important to resist my own desires than to submit to them. I think we grow more that way; I grow more that way.

Last night, I successfully said "no" to something I really wanted, and I don't want things very often at all. Being diabetic has helped me want less. It has helped me reconcile life on earth with some better future reality. Because a lot of life's purported pleasures are off limits to me, and I have to hope for apple fritters in heaven, or the new earth, or wherever we find ourselves when this life is all said and done.