Okay so for years my whole personality about this was “you don’t need a reason to buy a bag, the reason is it’s Tuesday,” and I said that with my entire chest, to anyone who’d listen, including a coworker who did not ask. Counting felt like something insecure people did. Like the second you open a notes app and start tallying handbags, you’ve already admitted there’s a problem, so why would you go looking for the receipt on that. Then in January, mostly out of boredom on a slow shoot day, I actually went through every closet, every bin under the bed, every tote bag hiding inside a bigger tote bag, and counted. Twenty nine. TWENTY NINE handbags.
And the belief I’d repeated for years, the “counting ruins it” one, just evaporated on the spot, because it turns out counting doesn’t ruin anything. Counting just tells you the truth you were successfully avoiding for a while.
So am I obsessed. Maybe! But weirdly the number itself wasn’t actually the part that convinced me either way, which sounds like a cop out, I know, stick with me though, because the two things that actually decide whether you’ve got a genuine problem or just a nice, if excessive, collection have almost nothing to do with how high you can count.
It’s Not the Number, It’s How Many You Actually Wear
Of the twenty nine, I sat down and tracked how many had left the house in the last twelve months, and the answer was eleven. Eleven bags doing all the work, and eighteen just existing, technically mine, technically taking up space, functionally decorative. One of them, a camel colored bag I bought for a wedding back in April, still has the tags on it, because the wedding got postponed and the bag went straight into a dust bag and never came back out, and I’d genuinely forgotten it existed until it was staring at me from a shelf like a receipt for a decision I never followed through on. That’s not a collection at that point, that’s a museum with really bad lighting.
The bags that actually get worn tend to be the boring ones, honestly, the black crossbody that survived an actual sprint for the bus and a coffee spill in the same week, the tote that’s been to every airport since 2022 and looks like it. The ones that never leave the shelf are almost always the ones I bought for a version of my life I don’t currently live, the going out bag from when I went out more, the structured one I thought would make me look like a person with a functioning morning routine. Owning a lot isn’t automatically obsessive if most of them are earning their keep. Owning a lot where two thirds are basically props waiting for an occasion that never shows up, that’s a different situation entirely and I think I knew that before I counted anything.
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I sent a photo of the still tagged camel bag to my friend Wren, who took one look and said “so this is aspirational purchasing,” and I have thought about that sentence more than I’d like to admit, because it’s exactly right and I hate when other people are exactly right about my closet.
The Real Tell Is What You Don’t Remember About Buying Them
Here’s the part that actually rattled me more than the number did. While I was counting, I found three bags I had fully forgotten I owned. One still had the receipt tucked in the pocket, from a store that has since closed, which means it had been sitting there long enough to outlive the location it came from. Not being able to remember buying something is a much bigger flag than owning a lot of something, because it means the purchase never really registered as a decision in the first place, it just happened to you, and then it got absorbed into the pile without a second thought.
The pattern underneath that is the actual tell, more than any number could ever be. It’s less about the bags and more about why they show up, whether it’s a bad day and a new bag magically appears, whether you’ve hidden a box from a partner or a roommate not because it’s expensive but because you don’t want to explain the timing, whether you buy something and immediately feel a small dread instead of excitement, which happened to me exactly twice this year and both times I ignored it completely. That feeling is worth more information than any spreadsheet of how many bags you own, because a spreadsheet doesn’t know how you felt in the fifteen seconds after you hit purchase.
So, am I obsessed with handbags. Honestly, probably a little, yes. But I don’t think the twenty nine is the evidence, I think the forgotten bag with the dead store’s receipt in it is the evidence, and the difference matters. If you’re using most of what you own and you remember buying it, you just like handbags a lot, and that’s allowed. If you’re finding tagged, forgotten purchases you can’t account for, that’s not really about handbags anymore, that’s about something else wearing a handbag’s outfit, and I’d rather admit that out loud than count again next year and pretend I’m surprised.
