The Discount Life (a truthful excerpt of fiction)

Hi. My name is Chloe and I am a Discount Life addict. I’ve been “real” for about one year now. The DLA is much akin to AA, except instead of downing alcohol we swallow sales, half truths and second bests. It’s like when you want the Lapis blue cashmere sweater but you buy the baby puke yellow and construction zone orange instead because they were on sale and you could get two for the price of one. Sounds great on the surface. Two sweaters! But let’s be serious. You’ll never wear baby puke yellow and construction zone orange because they don’t really look good on anybody. Which is why they were on sale in the first place. But in the moment you are able to convince yourself that perhaps neon orange is your color and you take them home and fold them up neatly and put them next to the countless other sweaters you’ve purchased at half price. Then you close the closet door, crawl into bed and dream about the Lapis blue sweater you didn’t end up getting. That, in a nut shell, is classic Discount Life behavior.


It happens all the time. You know what you want but its hard or expensive or just a little too long term to seem achievable. So instead, you choose the path of least resistance and happily, or blissfully in denial, take what has simply arrived in your path. Like the would be doctor who ends up a nurse. Or the would be violinist, who ends up a receptionist at the symphony under the guise, of course, that she is just doing it to work herself through to her big dream. Which is a half truth. Because while the latter is a familiar declaration, she hasn’t really worked on achieving that goal in six years. Six. At this point, being a receptionist is less a means of getting by and quickly becoming a career. And in six years she’s hardly let herself notice. Discount Life.

Until recently, I was addicted to and unaware of the Discount Life. I shopped at discount stores. I lived in a discount house. I had a discount job and I had a series of discount mates. When you add it all up, the truth is that living the discount life means only being half of what you could be if you’d really given yourself the chance to go all the way. No wonder we all feel so empty. We’re only half full.

But instead of letting this get the better of me, I chose to see my half full cup as an opportunity. What if we stopped living like we only deserved half of what we were worth? What if we scrapped expectations, preconceived notions and the versions of our lives that were handed to us and lived the all the way kind of life? So I started The Discount Life Anonymous and found out that tons of people felt the same way I did and now we’re all living fabulously. Okay well, maybe not entirely fabulously. Jack and Mel are still a bit wobbly on their feet and that lady from Little Rock probably should be in AA before she can get anywhere with the DLA program. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from step one: inspiration.

There I sat, in front of my closet, holding my baby puke yellow cashmere sweater from the Barney’s Outlet, thinking how sad it was that I had purchased this sweater on impulse instead of waiting until next week when I had the money to buy the Lapis blue sweater I really wanted. I bought the baby puke yellow one, on sale, from an outlet which, by definition, is the always on sale division of my favorite store. How lame. I gazed up at the hangers jutting from the tiny metal pole that spanned my closet. They were jammed packed with items just like this one. And it hit me. I had practically purchased my whole wardrobe at a discount. That sounds impressive until you take into account that 50% of my 50% off items were unwanted, un-wearable fragments I had purchased simply because I couldn’t stand the wait for something better. Under the allusive veil of security and the pleasure of the phrase “On Sale”, I immediately gratified myself with booty I truly didn’t need or feel good about but purchased anyway because it was there and seemed better than going without. And now I had a closet overflowing with ripped designer labels I’d sewn together by hand and oddly colored vetements that made my closet resemble a squashed bag of Skittles someone opened and left dangling from a hanger.

The Discount Life discovery left me with more questions than answers. I started adding up the cost of the last five items I purchased ‘on sale’ and quickly deduced I had paid $50 more for the five items I had yet to wear than if I’d just bought the Lapis sweater at full price. In a perfect world, the Lapis sweater would be on sale and I would buy it alone. Nothing wrong with that – because that’s what I really wanted. But that’s not what I did.

I needed to whittle down the meaningless swag and find clarity. I had an image of myself clearing out my closet. It played out like the part in a movie where the actress finds herself and Carly Simon plays in the background. Small clips with great music that spanned about a year’s worth of growth in two minutes and when it was over I would look like Julia Roberts and have Richard Gear by my side. My whole life would be happy and meaningful. And the simple first step was to clear out the closet. I’m going to chance an aside here and tell you, what’s important to remember about those two minute movie segments is that even they took months and months to make. And that’s where my story begins.



Step One: Clear out Your Life...

(wanna read more...check it out next week for the continuation)

CB