By the post title, I mean deliberately getting back into one, and trying not to get back into another!
The good one is reading. As a child I was a voracious reader and the only time I didn’t have my nose in a book was when I was writing my own stories. Then I grew up and the internet happened, and I went to university where I had to read nonfiction books for research all day long, and so my reading habits shifted from novels to blogs and forums, and my fiction-consuming habits shifted almost solely to TV shows and videogames. I’ve never really fully got back into the habit of reading books, although I do make a concerted effort every few months – I’m fully aware that my own writing improves when I read actual published works rather than stuff on the internet, interesting as a lot of stuff on the internet is. As such, for the last couple of weeks – ever since we got access to our books – I’ve been reading for an hour before bed. Also, I got a Kindle for Christmas, and in the last week or so I’ve been filling it up with ebooks to read while I’m on holiday. I’m looking forward to having some time for that again.
The bad habit – which I indulged in today but am not intending to repeat – is buying mounds of cheap clothing in Primark. Since my wardrobe cull, it’s been very important to me that I don’t end up replacing the mounds of cheap and unwearable clothes with more mounds of cheap and unwearable clothes, and so the clothes I’ve been buying so far this year have been better quality investment pieces that I know will get lots of wear. I realised that I don’t have enough lightweight summer clothes for my upcoming holiday though – in the UK climate you don’t usually need a lot of summer clothes, although the ones I do own have been seeing a lot of use during the heatwave we’ve been having for the last few weeks – and so I did break my Primark ban this morning. I don’t expect the clothes will last long, but I know I’ll get a lot of use out of them this summer – and that I now have the de-hoarding mental strength to get rid of them when they do wear out, which is the important thing.
I’m nearly getting to the point where I have enough clothes again. Not quite, but nearly!
(Books, on the other hand, I have far too many of – hence the Kindle, to make sure I don’t buy any more physical ones.)