Whoops, Almost

I think there comes a time in your life as a minimalist that you run out of things to do first, and finally (probably), you tackle your sentimental clutter. I’ve said before that keeping photographs was a weakness for me, and that was no underestimation.

Before

 

When my father died, I was a kid and I inherited a pretty hefty collection of pictures that he had printed out all throughout my childhood, and to him, almost every day was a special occasion that needed to be commemorated in print. To get a little heavy here, for a second, I think he always feared the day when the two of us no longer lived together.

Among the collection of things that I found when I looked into the box after his death, I found records of commendations that I received in elementary school and medals that I got from reading programs, clothing  that I must have worn when I was the size of a potato, and every terrific kid bumper sticker that I had been given in school. My dad’s hoarding was the beginning of sentimental hoarding for me.

I started out with all that, and in his honor and memory, I added to the group of things every time something of note happened. All of my birthday cards, papers that I had done exceptionally well on, and more photographs were all stuffed into the box until I graduated from college and then needed a total of five plastic containers to hold it all. I have photos.

A few weeks ago, feeling like I had run out of things to declutter, I finally took it upon myself to clean it out. I decided that I wanted to take my sentimental clutter from five containers to three. It’s not a big goal, but I met it. It took hours and was aided by a drink or two. I know that people believe that containing their closets is the hardest part of minimalism, but for me, it was getting rid of a pair of binoculars.

You know, the saying is: You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.

And that is the anti-mantra of the lifestyle that I’ve been undertaking in the past month, but I went through the day’s task with a practicality that it has always been easy for me to adopt. My father had owned one of the worst pairs of binoculars I had ever seen, and there was absolutely no reason for me to keep them. I couldn’t even remember a single time he used them. They sat in one container for years at a time, completely forgotten, and so they needed to go.

I put them into the donation pile and hauled them away a couple of days later to the local Goodwill.

However, immediately after we dropped them off, we needed to shop for jeans and so the two of us, Tom and I, went into the store-section and there, at the glass top table where they keep their unclassifiable objects, my father’s binoculars were sitting, having already been processed in the amount of time that it took Tom to find a pair of khakis. They were being sold for nine dollars.

I thought about buying them back. It was a very strong urge. After all, they hadn’t been too expensive, and I had already met my decluttering goal.

It must have been divine intervention that kept me from taking out my wallet.

Honestly, it sounds a lot more like a cautionary tale than it should. I really had been upset at the time. It was the duty of Goodwill to take what I no longer needed, but seeing them with a price tag was sacrilegious.

At the end of the story, I got home, and I waited a few days, and then I wrote a blog all about the experience. What I want people to take away from this blog is that owning my father’s things didn’t keep him from being dead. He is still not coming back, and as nice as those binoculars were on a sentimental level, they didn’t serve me anymore. They don’t serve me more than the photographs of him do or the real memories that I have of him.

I knew the binoculars before I gave them away, and I know them after, but I don’t need them, and now they will belong to someone who will use them far better than I ever did.

After: the utility closet still needs culling, but it certainly is an improvement.

 

Empty Bookshelves

There are about a million different ways to transition to a minimalist lifestyle and a million different ways to exhibit your minimalism to yourself or others.

You don’t have to get rid of all your possessions to become a minimalist at all.

You don’t have to have white walls in your home or dress in only neutral colors. Your countertops don’t have to be bare and neither do your bookcases.

It’s all about finding a way to live simply according to your own standards. Your brand of minimalism probably looks completely different from mine, and that’s cool. I like having less than 15 hangers in my closet. There are people who dip no lower than 50 and people who only have one hanger that they use only for their winter coat and both of those people can be minimalists.

There are several different brands of the lifestyle. I’ve read about people who eat minimalistically, or only practice the lifestyle in their closets or on their laptop and there are those who have numbered their belongings and have 100 or fewer things in their lives total.

One of my favorite things about the minimalistic community is that you aren’t considered better than others who are practicing the lifestyle if you have less than they do. It’s meant to be a choose-your-own-adventure sort of experience. It’s the exact opposite of keeping up with the Joneses because you aren’t trying to keep up with anyone and neither are you trying to measure your progress through the things that you own.

The saying is, after all, that you’ll go broke trying to keep up with the Joneses.

I’m not yet certain what path I want to take, but I know it’s starting with my home and has, in turn, transferred into my digital life. It’s just Facebook, but it’s been extremely gratifying to know that I will no longer be receiving game and app invitations and that all those friend requests that I have been sitting on are no longer waiting for me. I stopped following pages that were meant to provide me with quantities of entertainment more than quality stuff. And now my laptop desktop is almost empty.

My current desktop is much more relaxing.

At this point in the journey, Tom and I have probably culled somewhere around 20 percent of what we had when we began, and really, we’re nowhere close to being done. For others, it would be almost unreasonable to go further than that. For us, it’s really only a beginning. Things in the apartment still feel crowded.

We began the emotional process of decluttering by identifying our priorities and then deciding how minimalism was going to impact our reaching them.

1. Mental Health- Moving will be easier, there will be less daily maintenance of our belongings, and it will be easier to find things we’re looking for.
2. Eating Conscientiously- We’ll have more time to dedicate to cooking and baking (two of our hobbies) and we’ll buy less and be focused on consuming in order to eliminate food waste.
3. Saving Money- Consuming fewer items, having to store fewer items, and knowing what we do and don’t need will allow us to reallocate more money into savings.

As someone who’s considering the lifestyle partly as a way to decrease anxiety, there is much that needs to be done, and it’s easy to want to tackle all of the clutter in every part of the apartment at one time, but decluttering is done most efficiently through mindfulness. In order to handle things in a practical way, I remember the priorities that I’ve outlined. The anxiety I have about how clean the house is can be aided by having empty countertops, but isn’t aided by making sure that my wardrobe is tiny and put away. As someone who has anxiety about getting ready in the mornings, I can be aided by having a capsule wardrobe that eliminates the worry about whether or not my clothing matches. (My wardrobe will be the subject of another entry.)

Minimalism can be about getting rid of all of your things and starting over or it can be about getting control of one aspect of your life. Neither of these purposes is more worthy than the other. It’s a lifestyle that I’m practicing in order to add value over quantity in my life. For someone else, it may just be about being able to walk across the floorboards in their home without tripping over something.

 

 

 

The Truth About Clutter

According to several of the blogs that I’ve read in preparation for my new lifestyle, I’ve encountered the reason behind all of the clutter that we have in our lives. We own things because we are natural consumers or because something was on sale and we decided to consequently buy 20 of that thing.

Some minimalist authorities seem to believe that we only keep things just in case or that we’re too selfish to give things away, and that’s just shallow. Their theories are as valid as any other theories, including mine, but I refuse to believe that people are just consuming things for the sake of it. Humans are complex and wonderful things, products of a million variables, and taking into account only the same four or five factors that some believe leads to a life of hoarding or consumption doesn’t do them justice.

So, I’d like to add my own.

 

FEAR

Like, real-life fear. What happens if a button pops off of my interview pants just an hour before I have to be at a big interview? I had a back-up pair. What if so-and-so comes to my house and they don’t see that thing they gave me six years ago and I hurt their feelings? I don’t want to be that person! I kept it. Sometimes in a closet, wrapped up for what was seemingly an endless amount of time and they never asked about it again.

INCOME

It is much easier to throw out your old notebooks when you can always buy new ones. If you aren’t taking in too much income for any reason, it is easier to be tempted to hold onto things—it only makes sense to. Those last couple pages may be what keeps you from having to take down notes on the back of a receipt.

HARDWIRING

People just aren’t built to naturally want to let go of things. The tendency to hoard is built into the brain, just like the love of sugar and fats. Then, we build attachment to the things that we have hoarded. We as a people develop symbols from things we see daily. Maybe a piece of furniture is no longer just a piece of furniture, but a reminder of my father or the house that I used to live in. It’s a symbol now.

 

It is more than FOMO or even just having something around that we haven’t used yet. It’s more than ‘being a pawn’ or being greedy. For some, it can actually be painful to let things go even when they are going somewhere where they will be used all the time and worn into oblivion. (A valuable use of any object.)

Some objects become love letters from friends and family or from yourself.

Minimalism isn’t easy. It’s down-right hard. If you aren’t prepared to it, you aren’t going to succeed. Part of what you have to do in order to lead a minimalist lifestyle is to fight against your nature.

A tip that I saw recently read: do not keep things out of guilt. As if it’s that easy.

Here’s some of my favorite sentimental clutter.

I am a sentimental hoarder. Since beginning my grand cull, I have thrown out a lot of wonderful things like beautiful artwork that my brother made for me when he was four or five years old. These things bring me joy, but take up a lot of space when I keep dozens of pieces. However, one of the hardest things that I had to let go of was a card that was sent to me from the funeral home after the death of my father. For 10 years, I kept it hidden away, but still thought of it pretty often. For reasons more complex than I can explain, I couldn’t let it go. I didn’t feel better or worse when I got rid of it, but it was something I kept for almost half of my life, taking up space in my sentimental hoard.

So, is there one universal truth about clutter?

In Which It Begins

In a cute little apartment on main street in a cute little town, I live between the cute little mountains in a cute little valley in western North Carolina.

This is what it looked like on day 3

When Tom and I first moved into our apartment, the only furniture we had was a kitchen table, a couple of chairs, and a cot. Both of us had previously lived with roommates whose belongings completely furnished our respective apartments. In the effort to make our new space seem livable and homey, we added many, many things and in a way, we succeeded. It looks like people live here now.

We had finally been given the chance to make a space where we could showcase our personalities. And what was where the problem began. Our personalities were everywhere, in every nook and cranny of our apartment, and it all looked like mismatched and cluttered discord.

I considered minimalism.

Naturally, after a lot of self-reflection due to learning more about this lifestyle, I’ve remembered that my happiest times were centered around stretches when I had very few things with me. On trips with my family, I found a lot more happiness when I was interacting with others and then retiring with a book. (I am very introverted. Too much time with others is mentally exhausting for me.) When I am on those trips, I don’t end up packing much more than some clothes and a couple of things to do with my extra time.

Three years ago, I spent a summer living out of my car. The possessions that I brought with me included the same essential things: books, clothing, and things that I could use to write. During this time, I focused almost exclusively on my relationships with others and my love of creating.  These are the times that I consider to be pivotal moments of my adulthood and they are feelings that I associate with living with less.

My partner and I had filled and were pouring out of our home and we needed to make a real change. I decided that I this is what I needed for myself, and after we talked about it, he decided to follow my example. On the surface, it’s all very simple. I decided that there was too much stuff, so I got rid of it, but I wouldn’t uproot my entire way of living just so that I could make things prettier. I had needed more of a reason than that.

Most of you know the same struggle that has led me to the journey that I am undertaking. 350 million people around the world have depression and I am only one of them. Those of us who are able tend to be willing to sacrifice a lot in order to improve our lot. Those of us who are not able are sacrificing a lot as well. This is something I could go on and on about as someone with a history both undergoing and providing mental health treatment.

I’ve tried adding things to my life in the attempt to make it more fulfilling for years, and sometimes those things worked. I added more books to my life and reading made me happier. I added more varied food to my diet and I felt happier and healthier. I added more hobbies and learned a lot about a few more areas. Tom and I have a collection of over 300 books. While reading them made me happier, trying to find a space for them on one of our eight fully-flushed bookshelves did not.

My readings list from 2015

I probably spent hundreds of dollars on books last year and there are entire bookshelves in the house that I never reference.

My depression was no longer aided by adding things into my life. I decided to start subtracting things. At this point, I have been in the process of culling and donating many of my possessions in the effort to begin living as the best type of minimalist that I can be.

That being said, it’s important to specify that I am not using minimalism as a treatment for my mental illness, but as a way of improving my character, my financial situation, and as a way of working toward my life goals. This isn’t a blog about being depressed. It’s a blog about learning something new through experience. Everything else that happens will just be a side effect.

Through research about others experiences with minimalism, I’m learning that changing my consumptive lifestyle doesn’t mean that I have to be in the business of denying myself wants or needs, but practicing gratitude and logic in ways that I have always found valuable.

What I am in the business of is making a change.