Written by: Julianna Peters
I have too much stuff. No, I’m not a hoarder…but I feel like I could use a seriously good purge. When COVID started, I got sent home to wait out the pandemic. After the shock wore off and I got tired of watching the news and seeing the numbers tick up, I stopped and took inventory of my life. As I looked around my house, I decided it was time to get rid of the piles of crap I didn’t need. It was amazing. Truckloads were sent to the goodwill stores, and I finally had a chance to get rid of the things that had been piling up for years. Emboldened with a newfound sense of enthusiasm, I vowed never to let things pile up again. But that was in 2020. Since then, my home has slowly filled up with pandemic crafts, houseplants, and more things I dearly need to toss. Somehow, I’ve managed to accumulate another heaping pile of things I don’t need. Again. How did this happen? Perhaps I should take a moment to explain myself. The past few months, my life has felt unsettled – like there are just too many personal projects I need to do that have been pushed to the side since March 2020. And I’ll be the first to admit that I’m still trying to recover from the emotional whiplash that comes from having emerged from a worldwide pandemic.
After having experienced such instability on a global scale, I am ready to restore a sense of predictability to my life. So I’ve settled on the idea that I need to organize my things to prevent chaos from emerging. The next season is coming, and as such, I had better be prepared. If Ican pack everything into neat little boxes (like the organizational Gurus on Netflix), then maybe everything else in my life can finally fall together. In most respects, it’s true. Having less stuff makes sense. When I find myself not swimming in a mass of belongings, my life gets easier to manage. I finally found homes for my scissors, my tape, my bobby pins, and all those extra toothbrushes from the dentist. I found homes for things that used to lay buried in drawers that took me forever to weed through. I bought boxes, allotted stuff to either donate or trash, and found items I’d long believed were gone forever. Little by little, my life is starting to make sense again.
Having less stuff makes sense.
I am convinced that my newfound habits will keep me focused on achieving my goals. Thanks to better preparation, I am growing more efficient every day. It’s nice to cut down on time spent trying to find silly things like thumbtacks and tape. Or perhaps even more useful things, like those ever-evasive keys that keep disappearing. It’s nice to give my towels a home of their own, for items to have their proper place. It just feels good.
And the best part? With every step I take toward my goal of an organized, minimalistic home, I find myself growing more hopeful. I breathe a sigh of relief and feel like maybe the rest of my life can finally get organized too. Life isn’t about finding missing socks and dental floss. It’s about making time for the people you love and being able to do the things you love.
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