Some People Collect Memories from Their Travels. I Collect Things I Didn’t Pay For

I didn’t think of the habit I started as a child as stealing until recently

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

My 6-year-old eyes scanned the shelves of the store next door to our house, locking on the colorful packaging of a new candy bar. I turned to my dad with desperate eyes, begging for just one coin. His scolding crushed any hope. “No!” he said, reminding me I’d already had enough sugary treats for the day.

As soon as his back was turned, I walked back into that store. This time calculated. Greeted the same old familiar face of the shopkeeper. I looked at the candy bar again. It was a soft shell of wafer biscuits, with a gooey chocolate center, and covered with more chocolate from the outside. I knew I could take it, slip it into my hand, and no one would stop me. The thought didn’t feel dangerous or thrilling, it just felt possible. So I took it.

That quiet possibility would follow me for decades.

When I was 10, I often stopped by a stationery shop on the way home from school. I had a twin sister, the only twins in our small town. We would always strike a conversation with shopkeepers in our neighborhood. “We got a new collection,” a fresh graduate girl in the shop would tell us. I scanned the shelves until I saw it: a notebook with Pikachu, my favorite character, on the cover. I wanted it. I knew I could wait for the girl to turn her back, slip it into my bag, and leave without paying. The idea sat there in my mind, planning to do it on a day my sister wasn’t in tow. In a way, I knew I shouldn’t and that if caught, there would be consequences, but I didn’t feel guilt, nor a rush. I just wanted that Pikachu notebook, so I went ahead and made it mine.

At 15, I was at a friend’s house. Their house was spacious but cozy, with three bathrooms, five bedrooms, and a big terrace. Passing one room, while we were going out to the terrace, I spotted a small soldier figurine. It was chapped, green, sat up high on the shelf, and proud. I wanted it. Maybe because it looked like it would be a great fit for my collection of figurine soldiers. Later, when I said I was going to the bathroom, I passed it again. I looked up at it and thought, I could take this right now. No one would know. All I had to do with make sure that my friend and their family was not in sight. I turned my head around scanning the room and that thought was all I needed.

Fast forward 20 years from that first candy bar, and the pattern was still there. At the office, near the end of my shift, I felt a casual pang of hunger. I saw the fridge tucked into the corner, dimly lit, with shelves of gourmet sandwiches and candy bars. I could wait till I got home and cook something. I looked at the bagel sandwich. I could take it, and no one would notice. I already knew where the cameras were watching. I didn’t have to cook myself dinner that night.

I went into a grocery store to get my weekly groceries. I had a note of all the things I needed to get to stock up. I passed by a bakery aisle; the intense aroma filled my nose. I eyed the full section. I saw a pastry filled with minced beef, a pie. I got hungry on the spot; I wanted it. I picked it up, ate it, threw the paper package away, and didn’t pay for it.

In an antique shop, I was looking for a vase for my mom. I found one but also saw two interlaced swan figurines that would look good on my nightstand. I paid for the vase, but the swan figurines left in my pocket, with no one the wiser.

The bigger the prize, the better the planning was. Sometimes for seconds, hours, days even. I didn’t grab things hastily. I would make a few laps, think over the most discreet way to get the thing or play a mini movie in my head about who was watching and how easy it would be. I knew I could do it and not get caught; sometimes I acted on these calculated decisions. These thoughts weren’t loud or obsessive but were small, neutral, like checking the time. For years, if someone had asked whether I’d stolen anything, I wouldn’t have said yes. Not because I was lying, but because the moments didn’t even register as “stealing” in my mind.

I never told anyone the whole shape of it. At most, it came out in childhood anecdotes, dressed as mischief, stories that made me sound clever instead of compromised. Stories that you can laugh about from childhood. But I never handed them the thread that tied them all together. To share it outright would have meant letting someone else decide what it made me: a criminal, a liar, a broken person. The secrecy itself began to feel less like concealment and more like a polish, a way of carrying something dark in daylight without it looking dark at all.

It never felt like a weight. The secret lived with me the way breath does. Some people spill; some choke on silence. I never did. Keeping it was natural, almost easy, like remembering to blink.

I didn’t have the regrets other people might experience when they think about a wrong choice. The idea of “consequences” seemed like something for other people, not me. When it happened, it wasn’t that I thought I could always avoid getting caught, I just didn’t think about it much. Sure, I could’ve been punished for taking that notebook, or that candy bar that my old man denied, but somehow, it never felt like I was in any real danger. It wasn’t defiance, but more like an act and no second thoughts. I just did it, and that was that.

It wasn’t until I was 25 that I suddenly remembered a string of these moments. The candy bar. The Pikachu notebook, the figurine, all the extras I took. I realized they were all the same shape. It was all about noticing something, meticulously planning how to get it, and take it. Still, I didn’t stop.

That realization I had in my mid-twenties came randomly to me, not while I was doing it, but while I was in the middle of eating a sandwich. Perhaps because it was a bagel sandwich? It happened so suddenly that I remembered many scenarios that weren’t even in the back of my mind. It wasn’t like an epiphany but a moment of reflection. For the first time, I paused. Not out of fear, or shame, but because I understood something about myself that had been in the shadows: How did I plan that far back? How was it so natural as breathing and from a very young age. And now what?

I didn’t feel the regrets that usually accompanied such behavior. I didn’t feel a rush either, so why was I doing it? I asked myself this not in a self-pitying, existential way, but more like I was solving a puzzle about myself. For a long time, I didn’t think of my actions as part of a “problem.” They were just things I did. You could call it impulse, habit, or maybe just a personality with a tan: the shade that hides in plain sight, between flaw and feature. I wasn’t Robin Hood, or even a petty crook in my own mind. It felt as automatic as flipping a light switch. But I never stopped to ask myself: What was I trying not to see?

I searched online to look for clues to my behavior. I never searched the words “Petty theft” or “Shoplifting” because my activity wasn’t limited to only those actions. Instead, I buried myself in personality tests, lists of traits, descriptions of psychopaths. I read them all, noting what fit, what didn’t. The search itself wasn’t mine to begin with. A girl I once dated, sharp enough to notice both the charm and the edges, calling me something I’d never thought to look up. “Check it,” she said, as if the answer to me could be found in a word. So, I looked. As if she’d handed me a puzzle piece. I devoured the books, late nights under the glow of the screen, absorbing Cleckley, Hare, and others. Then Dutton’s book on the wisdom of psychopaths: I read it like a mirror. Recognition crept along. This wiring, these patterns, they were mine.

Then, I came across studies about brain development and how impulsivity can linger well into your mid-twenties because the prefrontal cortex, that part of the brain responsible for self-control and decision-making, is still under construction until then. That also clicked for me. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was an explanation. My actions weren’t born out of defiance or malice; they were a byproduct of a brain that hadn’t finished wiring itself.

Knowing why I did it didn’t erase the urge, nor the calculation or weighing if it’s worth it or not. But it did give me a pause I’d never had before. Standing in a store with something in my hand, or when I see something that I’d like to have, something that I could easily afford, yet the ritual of payment seemed unnecessary, a hollow barrier I could fold away with a single act. I’d feel the old calculation kick in. The certainty that no one would notice and then the quieter, newer thought: Do I really need to do this? That question was harder to walk away from than any security camera.

I don’t see it as “fixing” a flaw but fine-tuning my personality, a personality with a tan. It never felt like crime in the conventional sense. It was more intimate, a way of carrying a secret that only I knew, a private lens on the person I was becoming.

Like adjusting the brightness on a screen so the picture is clearer.

Still, often, I feel the thought slide in, slick as ever: I could take this. I turn it over in my hand, almost letting the muscle memory win. Then I put it back.

Usually.

Adam T writes about desire, identity, and the moral gray areas of human connection. He draws from personal experience to explore how relationships shape, expand, and reveal who we are, often delving into the spaces between societal expectations and personal truth.