I enter the dressing room with two shirts and a pair of $10 black tights in my hands. Before I unzip my jeans, I scan the four angular corners of the ceiling. No surveillance cameras. I take off my pants and slide on the tights. They look perfect, so I slide off the security tag and pull my faded jeans over them. Walking out, I’m slightly bulkier but totally inconspicuous. I buy the shirts.

Most people go on shopping trips, but I go on shoplifting trips. It’s petty theft, really — a notebook here, a pair of leggings there. It might seem morally objectionable, but that’s not how it feels. Growing up poor in New York City, I found myself with a deep hunger for material objects and scant resources to obtain them. My mother would dress me in clothes three times my size, saying it would save our family money for years, and at Christmas, my five siblings and I became more of a burden than a blessing. I did not ask for presents on my birthday. I never traveled outside New York’s five boroughs. And prom seemed like an extravagant expense, so I did not go.

In high school, I became consumed with want, but economic forces beyond my control — I couldn’t ask my parents to work more, and I couldn’t ask the world to charge less — constrained my universe. One day I was in a store, and I saw a tag had come off a black shirt with a glittering front. I didn’t need the shirt, but I had to have it. Tucking it into my purse, I walked right out of the store. Shoplifting, I realized, was easy, and the feeling of walking out of a store with something was intoxicating.