Musings about makeup hoarding and anxiety and stuff

I'm going to write a post soon about the process of sorting through my embarrassingly large hoard of makeup and on what basis I choose what to keep and what to get rid of (someone asked me about that once). Working through it has left me reflecting on why I accumulated all this crap to begin with. I'll have more to say about that in the upcoming post, but right now I just want to go ahead and blame grad school for saddling me with more makeup than any person who is not a makeup artist or a dragon who lives on top of some kind of giant sparkly heap of cosmetics under Lovely Mountain should reasonably possess. Certainly more than a person should have who is only just now kind of getting into lipstick and barely has enough eyelid space for more than one color of eyeshadow.

Hear me out on why grad school is one of the top factors to blame for my recent acquisitiveness and rampant consumerism (there are others, which I'll think about another time). In my experience, and in my observations of people around me, grad school seriously exacerbates people's latent pathologies/neuroses and brings out their weirdest behavior. Exactly what form it takes is different for everyone. It's much like any other prolonged, stressful situation in that respect, with the added bonus that the sorts of people who choose to go to grad school, and particularly those who pursue doctoral degrees, seem to be more prone to neurosis to begin with. In my case, I've always been fascinated by shopping/fashion/beauty, and I definitely had some hereditary hoarding collecting tendencies, and so this all came together in a compulsive need to own one of everything in every color. If you've been to grad school, you might be nodding knowingly, though many people spend their meagre grad school stipends on other, non-cosmetic, substances or develop totally different vices. If you haven't been to grad school, be satisfied with your life choices - or if you are considering going, do some research on anxiety/depression/mental illness + academia before you enroll.

Now that I've transitioned from grad school madness to post-grad school unemployment bleakness, I've cut down on the buying. I'm not trying to do some kind of "no buy" thing, because . . . that's still a sort of fixation on (not) buying makeup that doesn't work well for me. But the stress of unemployment is more of a general, hollow despair rather than an amped up, self-conscious anxiety, and it's hopefully temporary, so it's time to start sorting through the heap and move on to other preoccupations.

(I'm still having fun with the blog thing, though.)