KEY POINTS:
Before this week, I didn't realise there were so many fellow sufferers of this debilitating condition. It's when you're in a shop, looking at clothes you're not really sure about, and the next thing you know, the item is over your arm, and an unseen force, more beautiful
and powerful than anything you've ever known, is guiding you towards the till.
When in a shopping coma, one is not making zombie noises, or walking with both arms straight out in front like some retail somnambulist, but you might as well be, your levels of engagement are so low.
You know those stories about near-death experiences, when people talk of how they floated above the bed, watching doctors trying to resuscitate them. It's like that, except you're floating above yourself, watching your hand digging for the card that hasn't got a sweet stuck to it, and then trance-walking out of the shop, with your eyes doing funny spirals.
So, that's shopping coma - a near death (well, bankruptcy) experience that doesn't affect your statutory rights, and with an average of 28 days to recover. If recover you ever do.
Now a study reveals I am not alone in suffering from shopping coma.
It seems many women are guilty of "hoarding" vast mountains of unworn shoes - in Britain alone it's (7.5 million), for dresses (5.2 million) and for handbags (2.2 million).
A spokesperson for eBay calls it "an untapped goldmine". I call it naughty.
Surely the whole point of "retail therapy" is it's supposed to be simpler and cheaper than hiring a psychiatrist. With that kind of money floating around one could afford to have Sigmund Freud exhumed to take on your case.
A lot of the hoarded items haven't even had their price tags taken off. We're just buying things and slinging them into the back of the wardrobe, resulting in a kind of Fashion Nagasaki. Indeed, maybe it's time for some of us to admit that the game's up and our inner fashionista might not be all she's cracked up to be.
In many ways I'm a good fashionista. I stubbornly continue to haunt young women's shops, even though I'm uncomfortably aware I'm coming across like the Ghost of Trendiness Past.
I scoff magazines such as Grazia, and know all the key icons - Kate M, Mischa B, Sienna Miller, when she's not turning up at awards' ceremonies adorned solely in her gran's knickers
I'd probably be one of the all-time great fashionistas if it weren't for the fact I know absolutely nothing about clothes.
What to wear. How to wear it. When to stop wearing it because people are getting eye-strain or threatening to call the police. There's the rub: fashionista stuff I know about; actual fashion? Not so good.
It's a tragedy. Almost as if I'm fashion kryptonite: any time I put anything on I ruin a key trend. For example, smock tops (walking billboard for pregnancy test), hyper-trendy scarf with skull motif as popularised by la Moss (small children mock openly).
All hopeless, all pointing to the same conclusion: I don't look nice. It would seem that women like me, however much we hate to admit it, simply cannot access our inner fashionista.
So what does that make us? Failed fashionistas, Siennas without portfolio?
Considering we indulge almost exclusively in "car-crash couture", how about crashionistas! And, painful though it is, once a woman realises she is less fashionista than crashionista, everything starts to make sense. The mountain of clothes, shoes and bags, so horrible and misjudged it's not even worth taking the price tag off.
The stunned silence when we try to "work" a new look. The reason we're the only women in the world who can open our closet doors and cry "I have nothing to wear" and have everyone agree with them. If any of this rings true then you, too, are a crashionista. Not that all hope is lost. I'm going to start a helpline: "Crashionistas hurt, too". And there may be financial compensations. For the fashionistas rule the style melee. For us, it's eBay here we come.
- OBSERVER