i am neurotic.

store conspiracy When I go clothes shopping I have to know exactly what it is that i want or need…Otherwise the people in the store will zoom in on me and say something like “can I help you?” which translates to me “buy everything.” So when I go into the store, I avoid all eye contact until I find what I need, then I go straight to check out without saying a word to anyone. Sometimes I can’t even breathe until I know that I’ve made it out of the store before “anyone” knows I was there. WHEW!!!

Whenever I have to buy something at the grocery that I find embarrassing (deodorant, female stuff, weird medicine), I have to distract all of the shoppers who are surely analyzing my purchases by also buying something normal, like milk or a pack of pencils or something…even if I don’t really need anything else.  This keeps people from thinking that I actually need any of that other stuff.

If I go into a store and I don’t find what I am looking for, I have to buy something small so the employees don’t think I stole something and walked out.

Whenever I go into a store to purchase a beverage, I twirl the beverage in my hand, palm up, a half rotation at a time. This goes on from the second I lift the beverage off of the shelf to the twirl that lands in on the clerk’s register. More than once, I have dropped glass bottles on the floor, but that has never stopped me.

I always need to buy second and third bottles of shampoo to store for later use. I mean, what’s worse than realizing that you need to wash your hair and there’s no shampoo to be had?! The same approach applies to toothpaste and other hygenic products.

I would not consider myself claustrophobic by any stretch of the imagination, but whenever I am in a large store, a department store, H & M, TJ Maax, any of those places, as spacious as they are, I always feel that other shoppers are getting too close to me.  I go to great lengths to avoid looking at what anyone else is looking at or even being in the same aisle with any other person, even if the aisle is 50 feet long. I waste a lot of time at these stores waiting for other people to get away from the things I want to see, because I don’t want to be anywhere near them.  If someone gets within a 5 foot range and starts touching things on the rack where I am looking, I have to give them the dirtiest stare possible and walk away, like “How dare you??”