I counted them on the drive home, which is a very specific kind of shame, sitting in a parking lot doing tote bag math instead of going inside my own house. Fourteen. Fourteen tote bags, and that’s not counting the two currently doing time as recycling bins in the garage, which I’ve decided don’t count because they’ve been demoted.
This all started because a woman named Dana, who I’d met exactly forty minutes earlier at a dinner party I was only at because my roommate begged me, looked at the bag I’d hung on the back of my chair and said, “Is that from the bookstore downtown? Don’t you already have like three tote bags?” Not mean about it. Genuinely curious, the way you’d ask someone why they own six identical black t-shirts.
But the table went quiet in that specific way where everyone’s suddenly very interested in their pasta, and I felt like I’d been called up to the front of a courtroom I didn’t know I was on trial in.
Here’s what I actually said, out loud, to a table of strangers: “I don’t have three. I have considerably more than three, and I will defend every single one of them if you give me the floor.” Nobody gave me the floor. I took it anyway.
The thing nobody at that table understood is that a tote bag isn’t one item, it’s a category pretending to be one item
This is the part I didn’t manage to get across between the bread basket and someone changing the subject to a ski trip. A tote bag from a museum gift shop and a tote bag from a farmers market and a canvas one some hotel gave me for free in 2019 are not the same object just because they share a silhouette. They do completely different jobs. The free hotel one is what I grab when I’m hauling wet swimsuits and a paperback to the beach and genuinely do not care if it comes home stained. The stiff canvas one with the boxy bottom is the only bag I trust with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread on the same subway ride, because it doesn’t collapse in on itself like the flimsier ones do. I learned that the hard way outside a bakery, watching a baguette slowly bend at a ninety degree angle inside a bag that was clearly built for magazines and nothing heavier.
So when someone says “you have twelve tote bags” like that’s a moral failing, what they’re actually saying is “I’ve decided all bags shaped like a rectangle with two handles are interchangeable,” and they’re wrong in a way that a purse person would never be wrong about purses. Nobody tells a woman with four crossbody bags that she only needs one. Each of those has a job. Mine do too, they’re just cheaper and less photogenic about it.
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The other thing is that totes are basically the only bag category where the receipt doesn’t sting. My most expensive one cost eighteen dollars and has held up through three years of being thrown into car trunks, sat on, used as an impromptu ice pack carrier once during a genuinely bad picnic. My cheapest one was free and it’s outlasted a purse I paid ninety dollars for that fell apart at the zipper within a year. There’s something almost funny about defending a hobby that costs less than most people spend on coffee in a month, but there I was, defending it anyway, because being cheap doesn’t stop people from treating a collection like it’s excessive just because it’s visible.
What I didn’t say at the table, because I only thought of it in the car, is that the real defense isn’t about usefulness at all
It’s that I like having options for a version of the day I haven’t had yet. That sounds precious, I know, but stick with me. Some mornings I need the structured one because I’m going somewhere that requires a bag to sit upright and behave itself. Some mornings I need the soft slouchy one because I’m just running to get milk and eggs and don’t want to think about it. Some days call for the tote with the slightly obnoxious slogan on it because I’m in a mood and want my bag to say something I’m not saying out loud. None of that is efficient. All of it is exactly why I have more than three.
I did, eventually, tell Dana all of this, roughly two weeks later, over text, because the conversation kept bothering me and I have never once let a mild social confrontation go unfinished in my life.
She said, fair enough, she just has one bag and forgot other people don’t operate that way. Which, honestly, is the most reasonable response anyone’s ever given me about this, and I almost wish she’d argued back so I had someone to keep being annoyed at.
The truth is, I’m not going to stop at fourteen. There’s a good chance there’s a fifteenth one already folded up in my car right now, from some errand I don’t remember running. I’ve stopped apologizing for it, mostly. A tote bag costs less than a bad cocktail and does more work than most things in my closet, and if that makes me the person at the party with the collection everyone quietly judges, fine. Judge quietly. I’ll be the one who brought a bag sturdy enough to carry the leftovers home.
