Women Be Shopping - by Rose Dommu
I spent most of my formative years — if I wasn’t at rehearsal for whichever school play I’d managed to get cast in or locked in my room reading fanfiction — at the mall. As I didn’t get my driver’s license until a few months after my 17th birthday (on the third try, no less), and I lived in Boca Raton, Florida, my options for getting there were limited. My parents had divorced years earlier and my mom had a new husband, infant twins, and a demanding job. I attended a magnet school 45 minutes away, so none of my friends lived close enough to hang out after school or on the weekends. I was wildly unsupervised, and if I wasn’t such a fundamentally good kid I could have gotten into a lot of trouble. Instead, I went shopping.
Every few weeks I’d crack open the Yellow Pages, find the local taxi company, and call a cab for the five-minute drive to Town Center Mall (established 1980). As I sat in the backseat reading, motion sickness be damned, I’d catch the drivers giving me confused looks through the rearview mirror. Why was this teenager paying $10 for a yellow cab to the mall in the early aughts? Who was this chubby, friendless loser wearing their black bar mitzvah souvenir t-shirt with its silver comedy and tragedy masks? (Yes, my bar mitzvah was Broadway-themed.)
Once at the mall, my lonely sojourn continued. I walked from store to store in my combat boots and parachute pants, which would later become American Eagle cargo shorts and Chuck Taylors, then Juicy Couture track pants and Rainbow flip flops. I’d sample sesame chicken at the food court, haunt the stacks at Waldenbooks, and flip through the pop-rock section at FYE. I was alone, but at the mall I wasn’t lonely, at least not in a way I was aware of. Any lingering ennui at the reality of my isolation could be easily cured by handing over my mother’s credit card and forging her signature, something my siblings and I can all do expertly to this day. Carrying those shopping bags, whose contents I was mostly indifferent to, showed the world that I wasn’t alone, I was shopping. I wasn’t a loser, I was a consumer. I didn’t need people if I had stuff.
To this day, consumption remains my stand-in for company. No plans on a Friday night? I’ll binge a new TV show or watch a reliably comforting film while Afterpaying shoes I don’t need or can’t afford (or both!) The high of a purchase gives me that momentary dopamine rush, sweet enough to stave off sadness for an hour or two. I am someone who has defined myself by the things I watch, read, listen to, and buy. I’ve even turned it into a career. But I’m still that girl walking around the mall, hoping a new CD or pair of pants will make me happy. They haven’t yet, but hope prevails.
I went back and forth about starting a newsletter. What did I have to say? What was the point of saying it like this? What would it be about? And I suppose I landed on this: it’s me reaching out to you, the person reading this. Are you lonely too? Are you walking around the world with a bottomless pit inside you, trying to fill it up with Sex and the City reruns and Lana Del Rey albums and Marvel movies and podcasts and fanfiction and Margiela Tabis and gay historical erotica and Beyoncé and iced Americanos with oat milk and Target runs and YouTube video essays and the Ssense sale and bleaching your hair again and Tretinoin and Boy Smells candles and Glossier boy brow and Madonna and credit card debt? Girl, same.
Every week, readers will get two newsletters. Hot topics will cover just that: newsworthy pop culture that I have a take on, a problem or obsession with, or just feel like shooting the shit about. Cool people will feature interviews, profiles, and essays on people, real and fictional, who I’d love to share an Auntie Anne’s cinnamon sugar pretzel with. Mall Goth is about obsession, nostalgia, desire. Mall Goth is about not being too cool to actually, you know, like stuff. It’s the intersection of overconsumption and existential dread. Taylor wanted you to meet her behind the mall. I’ll see you at Bloomingdale’s.
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