Shopping the gaps

The changing of the seasons, for me, meant, for the longest time, shopping.
First, making a tour of every clothes and shoe selling establishment in town to find out what the most recent must-haves were, then the acquisition of at least five big plastic totes full of garments.
At home, then, the attempt to squeeze those into the overflowing closets along with last year´s bounty, and that of the years before that. As it was, most of those clothes never even got worn because they had been pushed to the back of the closet, wedged in with way too many of their brethren.
And still I had that experience of standing in front of said overflowing closets uttering the immortal words "I have nothing to wear".
As I have been decluttering those garments that had become decidedly too big with recondensing myself, the first gaps appeared on the clothes racks. Now I haven´t finished recondensing yet, so any garment I´d buy right now would probably not fit me at goal weight, anyway. And that meant that those gaps were not filled back up by new acquisitions.
Guess what, I didn´t have to go bare. I didn´t even have to raise the frequency with which I´m doing laundry. The clothes I own today are completely sufficient for my needs, even though there are maybe half as many as I used to have. And by now, most of them get to see regular wear, too.
By now, I have successfully recondensed the greater part of my extra baggage, and come down to clothes sizes in the normal range. There´s  a high probability that the clothes I have would mostly still be wearable down to goal or at least close to it. So, this year, there was no shopping expedition (excepting one summer blazer I got on sale). Instead, I shopped my closet.
By now, I´ve grown so used to those gaps between garments on the rack that I don´t even have the feeling of missing something any more. Partly, that may be due to the fact that my body, by now, isn´t that fat any more. I feel better in it, and the frantic search for garments that would somehow camouflage my obesity is a thing of the past.
Besides, what with my limbs no longer squeezed against each other by the rolls of fat that had developed with weight gain, I have noticed that it takes me much longer to wear out a garment, so my existing stack will last me even longer.
For the time when I reach goal, my intention is to keep the number of garments small, replacing clothes as necessary but not piling them on the way I used to.
Not only will that save me from spending a substantial slice of my income on clothes I won´t even wear, or wear too rarely to justify their price, it´s eco-friendly, too.
And for the first time, there´s no need for pangs of conscience because I´d been wasting my time, my money, and my closet space on items I did not need or use.


Julia