Lately I’ve felt the need to purge. Get rid of junk. Pick the rotten old scab off the skin of my life right now, even though my whole life kind of feels like a rotten scab.
Purging is not something that comes naturally to me as a person. In college I picked up a bit of a hoarding habit, I thought of myself often as a character in my favorite movie Labyrinth, a puppet who clomps around a land of trash and picks up items that she deems as worthwhile or useful and tosses them on her back until they become a part of her physical body. She hunches over, a hump of trash and antiques towering over her like an extreme hunched back, encouraging the films protagonist to hold on to items in her room that hold nostalgia or aesthetic value. The more I think about it, the more I think my hoarding habit might be drawn from this movie in general, maybe I admired the slow panning camera scene in the beginning of the film where Sarah’s room is filled with toys, knick-knacks, and sweet memorabilia.
When I left my family home to live by myself for the first time, the hoarding habit got out of hand. I was shopping constantly, if not in store then online. My last apartment in Brooklyn was never ever clean, and was constantly filled with weird things I saved off the street or picked up at thrift stores. When I packed up all this junk and moved across state back to live with my family again, I realized that I was filling my life with nostalgic trash. I remember telling my favorite therapist that I would never be the kind of woman who loves to travel and can fit everything in a bag at a moments notice to hop on a whirlwind adventure. First of all, I think the idea that all young people are privileged enough to travel is dumb, and I won’t get into it now, but the idea of wandering has never appealed to me. I’m a loud person who lives quietly. It takes me a long time for me to figure out where i’m going and feel comfortable in my surroundings, and i’m genuinely happiest when i’m spreading my roots in a place I care about compared to exploring new places I’ve never traversed.
I still identify as this person, but I definitely have come to acknowledge that I hid behind being a homebody as an identity in my late teens and early 20s. I clung to being the kitschy woman with too many things who was afraid to leave her house on the weekends as an excuse to let the objects in my life take over. Even when I began to embrace paganism in my college years I was really gripping to the excuse to cast spells and leave them hanging around my house as a form of proof that they were working.
As I’ve been getting more invested in my research into production values as it relates to our fast consuming society, I felt that my life was no longer living up to the expectation of my morals. I could no longer look at the pile of pilled fast fashion clothes in the corner of my room endearingly as things I should save to wear one day. I also found that the more I committed to making choices that would lead to long term happiness versus short term satisfaction, I couldn’t keep physically or metaphorically stepping over the trash in my life anymore. I also have been doing some very minimal (blatant pun intended) research into minimalist lifestyles, mostly using youtube and blogs. I particularly like a youtuber and blogger called Rachel Aust, who has very reasonable recommendations for consolidating your life but still appeasing aesthetic needs. She made a 30 day entering minimalism challenge that I might try to record here on this blog.
This being said, I’m never ever ever going to be a minimalist. I’m never going to be a woman with five total pairs of shoes or be able to fit all of my clothes in one travel casual duffel. I’m literally a maker, by definition I put more things into the world, i’m not great at taking them away. But the more I think about the well being of myself as person, consumer, and a woman, the more I need to get ride of the things that don’t fit me physically or morally anymore. I dumped 6 bags of my former treasures into a donation bin today, and i’m currently just happy to be swathed in clean sheets and be able to see the floor of my room.
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