by Alison Rominger (@heartskipsbeat)

Hi. I’m Alison, and I am not the 25-30 year old in this infographic:

Oh I used to be, which is how I ended up with more shoes, massages, clothes, kitchen gadgets, yoga classes, paintings, flokati rugs, haircuts, knick knacks, doo dads, tschotskes, and pink roller skates then any human being would actually need. How did this happen you ask? How did an otherwise perfectly sane, responsible and dare I say frugal person turn into a borderline hoarder/shopping addict?

First there was Gilt Groupe. And that was quickly followed by RueLaLa, Ideeli, Groupon, Lifebooker, Fab.com, One Kings Lane, Living Social, etc, etc, etc, each one more enticing and with better deals than the last.  It would all start first thing in the morning, when I would peruse through the emails for the daily local deals. Zip lining in Philadelphia? Sign me up! Shooting lessons in South Jersey? Yes please! Then I would browse through the preview emails to map out my plan of attack for the sales that start at noon.  At five of noon, I would open each website in my browser and hit refresh every thirty seconds until it was noon on the dot. Then bam! Flurries of clicking and shopping carting the first items I could get my grubby little arrow on before some other hapless shopping addict did before me.

Then would follow a mad dash to check out before my 10 minutes expired and my coveted winnings were snatched from my shopping cart and thrown back to the wolves. Chaching! The sweet feeling of success when the “thank you for blowing your entire paycheck with us” email arrives in my inbox. Join you for lunch? Sorry guys I’m broke, but wait till you see me sashaying around the office in the fancy new boots I just bought.

Then I moved to New York City. And when I arrived at my new, much, much smaller apartment it quickly dawned on me that I had a lot of stuff. What is all this stuff? And where am I going to put it? I realized then that I had a problem that needed to stop. Cold turkey. No more online shopping at all. Starting that day all emails would be redirected to the junk mail box, all websites would be un-bookmarked and I would not give in, no matter what.

One year later, and A LOT of stuff lighter, I can proudly tell you today I am no longer that infographic. And when a friend sends me an instant message at noon on the dot that reads: “Tell me to put it back!!” with a link to an item they most definitely do not need, I can reply, “Don’t be such an infographic, put it back!”

Do you see yourself in the infographic above? What about your co-workers?