Every week I find things. I buy things. I bookmark things. I sell things. I pass things by. I regret not buying things. I give things to my friends. I donate things. A misshapen pile evolves in my hallway, an obsession masquerading as a finite project: a spring cleaning or Sunday reset.
I revere Things — Objects, Art, Media, Fashion, Furniture, Ephemera — and believe the making of something, the act of something beautiful having been made, is on par with a spiritual order.
And yet, the vulnerable truth is that I have a painful relationship to the things I own.
I am torn between the veneration of the Beautiful Thing, and an aching desire for total emptiness. Emptiness as in owning nothing, and of being made of nothingness. I envision this emptiness as a means to freedom — freedom from what the things I own say about me and the time and places they tie me to.
To bridge this chasm, I have wound myself up in this cycle of acquiring and releasing, always tightening the loop, nearing the kind of efficiency that says one thing in, one thing out. At the end of this spiral is an image of me, me with a highly curated life: I am in my apartment looking at every. single. thing. I own and I love it. It’s singular. Exceptional. I run my hands over it, feel its weight, admire the craftsmanship, and smile knowing that I can tell you exactly who made it and exactly where it was made. In this fantasy, there isn’t a meaningless or ugly thing in my possession.
There is so much joy for me in this process, in collecting and (re)collecting. It is a joy rooted in what I see to be the depth and humanity infused into the making of things. It is the feeling of lighting up from the inside out when finding something new. It is also the pain of that new thing never being enough.
This tension, pulling me with equal force towards a genuine love for collecting beautiful objects and a fixation on the perfect collection, has — for years — consumed me. I have become consumed by consumption – and its opposite.
I don’t know how to solve for this, if it is solvable, or when (if ever) I want to solve it. But I suspect that I am not alone. Because what is packed into this experience of buying, ridding, and re-buying, is a lot of complexity about womanhood, race, class, status, belonging, and capitalism in America. And at the same time, this cyclical process is imperative to developing one’s own taste.
And next to all of that, there still exists the simple pleasure of shopping, of finding. Over the last 15 years as a shopping hobbyist, I’ve collected a mass list of brands, makers, and objects in my personal archive.
This platform is an attempt to create a container for these contradictions to coexist. I hope that this will be a space for me to attempt to unpack what underlies our relationship to buying things, and frankly, to help you find things you might like to buy.
Here’s how I am thinking about this project:
1 – The Blog
Essays exploring the intersectionality of consumption, style, taste, how the world sees us, and how we see ourselves. I’ll be looking for the throughline with each issue and invite you to wander through these questions together.
2 – The Source List
A resource/archive/directory I’ve built to bring order to my obsession. A filterable discovery index of curated sources across home, fashion, and beauty. Not recommendations! It’s a practical field guide for brand and product discovery. And I hope a starting point for you to explore, to find, on your own. 25-50 new sources are added with each update.
