15 Personal Reasons Why I Thrift

A tiny handbook for life, on Earth Day and every day.

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Happy Earth Day, everyone. This piece originally appeared here in A Tiny Apt. last year in honor of the annual reminder to cherish our environment. I hope it inspires you to thrift more, give away more, and notice/appreciate all the beautiful things you keep and love in your life and space…xxCb

There’s a memory I have, from about 20-ish years ago when I made the choice to move back home to Long Island, back into the house I grew up in with my parents, to try to get my life together. The memory is this: I still have my college car, a 1987 white Plymouth Duster w/ a stick shift and cute hatchback. I wake up early on a Saturday in the winter to get into my car and warm it up. I noodle with the gears, back out of the driveway, then pull onto Montauk Highway heading west. I remember passing the giant Beer Barn (an actual barn for beer) on my left, an outdoor farmer’s market on my right…the day was just beginning. And because I knew I was going thrifting, I felt consumed with happiness. 

But it was more than just happiness, which is why it felt worthy of sharing here…and why I remember that moment still, at the exact spot I became aware of it, all these years later. It was exhilaration. Pure and bracing. No matter how grueling it was to be commuting four hours a day on the Long Island Railroad to my junior editor job in the city, I had all my Saturday mornings, exactly like this one, to look forward to. These weekly adventures wouldn’t get me into more debt. Because most of the time, I came home empty-handed. But they gave me something else—a kind of richness and sense of purpose that is hard to describe. A sustenance and actual high I imagine some long-distance runners might get when they’re falling into their pace and everything just feels so right.

And occasionally, I did find something. Like a vintage tweed Chanel jacket (canary yellow with black embroidered piping); a pair of vintage high-waisted Levi’s with a button-fly that I had to wiggle my way into, but loved and wore for a decade until I could wiggle into them no more. A vintage gingham Krizia bustier that I wish SO BADLY I still had. An ancient Grundig radio/record console that worked beautifully and inspired me to start collecting old records by Joe Jackson, The Clash, and Donny Hathaway.

I didn’t know who I was at 28…only that I desperately wanted to make/do something of real purpose in my life while dealing with some heavy shame for (still) being tethered to my parents and seemingly incapable of making a good enough living on my own. But when I went thrifting, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. In the drive from here to there. In the meandering up and down aisles. In the gentle chit-chat between fellow thrifters and charity shop owners. In the bliss that I felt when I arrived at a crate brimming with tiny framed pictures and mismatched tea cups. Maybe something important was waiting in there for me, like a love letter from another time…a clue or some guidance for exactly where I stood in that very moment. In those years when thrifting became a form of ritual and recreation, I began to know who I was. And LIKE who I was. And these exercises in solitude and vintage silk Hawaiian shirts always led me back to her whenever I got lost.

For me, and maybe you, too, thrifting isn’t just a hunt or a discovery mission. It’s freedom. It’s a big giant EXHALE in a warehouse of lost-and-found that sparks a million untold stories, not only in that one little history, but in ourselves. Thrifting is giving…and it’s compassion: Like when we pick up a photo of a couple at their wedding in 1922, and hope that something good came of it.

Dining Tables 4 Small Spaces

That memory in my ‘87 Duster on Montauk Highway—when I felt a GUST of life rip through me and bring me into that very moment—felt like a message from my 28-year-old self to the person I am today, right here. And it’s only now that I know what the message was for—that thrifting would save me. Not just as my most cherished form of adventure, but also as a touchstone that could heal and fortify me. At the best of times, and the worst of them, too.

I’m nostalgic more than I am sentimental. But I’m also charmed and mystified by the lives lived in imprint of things, or the imagined lives. I love thrift shops because it’s like having permission to dig through someone else’s closet. To find their gems, to hear their private stories, and feel less alone. If there was a club that went on tours of old apartments and houses before they went on the market, maybe even before they were cleaned out, I would be the PRESIDENT of that club.

And something else I know for sure is that there is no one way to thrift. Like cooking or sewing a garden, each of us finds our own way into it. You don’t have to thrift like me, but you can find a path to commune in a thrift store or a charity shop or a flea market where you can begin your own journey into pre-loved and second-hand everything…and become a part of this spectacular community of collectors, nomads, vagabonds, stylish, sustainably minded weirdos all traversing the world and their local towns for another vintage pepper grinder or a piece of Carven history.

Some of these are a bit personal, but, in no particular order, here’s why I thrift. And, maybe on this particular Earth Day—which is EVERY day—you might be inspired to thrift more, too❤️.