MY MINIMALISM STORY: How I Took Control of My Life and Learned to Live with Less

I feel like I've been avoiding making this video just because it feels personal. Getting into my history of where I was before I found minimalism, and how I got to this point where I just had so much excess, it feels very personal to talk about. But I realized I have this whole channel, a lot of it focused on minimalism, and I haven't really ever talked about it. How did I get to the point where I put so much meaning and emotions into the objects around me, and how did I get myself out of that? So today, I guess I just want to tell you that story. I guess it all started with how I learned to relate to belongings. I grew up in the 90s when there was such an emphasis placed on stuff. I learned through implicit and explicit ways that the more you have, the happier you'll be. It was really popular to have collections of things. It was the time when beanie baby collections were in. It was also an era that seemed to be against outfit repeating. I remember in school when kids would explicitly talk about judging other kids for repeating the same outfit in the course of a week, or say something like, haven't we seen that sweater a lot from her? There was social pressure to have more, more, more, and I think it partially stemmed from the fact that stuff was just more readily available for the first time due to technology. And then as the internet grew, I think the culture spread more widely, that in order to be happier, you need to have more. I also learned in my childhood how keeping things could actually be more frugal, that if you kept that tool for the kitchen and then needed it sometime later, you wouldn't have to repurchase it if you kept it. I also think there was a social pressure to have more as a kid. My parents were and actually are still musicians. They worked so hard in my childhood. It was really an inspiring artistic environment to grow up in. I remember going to their rehearsals as a kid. It was such a fun experience to see what they were doing and to see them working so passionately and so hard. And one of the effects of being a musician is that you have to work extra, extra hard for the money that you make. And so my parents were always working and therefore were really thoughtful about where they were placing their money. And so at the time, in the context of where we lived and what they valued in our educations, they decided to send us to private school. They were basically putting their money into our educations rather than other things and stretching themselves really far in order to send us to those schools. And I just remember feeling a little bit on the outside at school. It felt like everybody else had way more money than we did, always had new outfits, always had the on-brand items, and they'd go through these trends really quickly, whereas I often had off-brand stuff or would wear the same outfits for longer periods of time or wear my sister's hand-me-downs. But often I did feel judged by the kids at school, by what I wore, by what I had. And if I'm honest with myself, probably a lot of it came from what a nerd I was. Like I was on the debate team, I studied really hard, I was in plays. And so I just wasn't the cool kid in school at all. But I think the fact that I also felt just less well-off than everyone around me made me feel isolated, especially at a time where outfit repeating was talked about explicitly, where people would judge other people and make fun of them for that kind of thing. And so even though I honestly had plenty and my parents provided me everything I needed, I sometimes envied other kids. And then those times where I did get an item that I was proud of or that I really liked, I suddenly felt powerful. I felt like, hey, maybe people will like me more if I wear this item and they notice it. And so I think for me, those objects became really important and impactful on a social level, which when you're a kid is something you really care about. And I just think that I was in a very privileged bubble, I need to acknowledge that. I was very fortunate in about a million ways, but within that privileged bubble, I always felt like I was on the outside. And for me, sometimes that feeling of being on the outside translated to stuff. And then another factor that impacted my relationship with belongings was my love of history. Because I loved history, I really grew to understand that objects can be important and impactful. They can have meaning and have an emotional effect on people. When you go to a museum and you're in the presence of objects or art that was created by people hundreds or even thousands of years ago, there's something thrilling about it. It's like this little time capsule that proves that we exist. So through all these many different avenues, just the overall culture, from the idea of frugality, from the social pressure, from my love of history, I gradually believed that objects were important. I mean, I don't know that I would say that explicitly then, but I think that's how I felt. And honestly, I think that's how a lot of people at the time felt. But I think over time that led me to have this almost addiction to stuff. I think a lot of us actually experience this phenomenon where we just want more and more and we want to chase that feeling that we get when we finally obtain that object that maybe we've been hoping to get for a long time. And often it's for real reasons because of the impact it could have on our relationships or our status. And our stuff is a way for us to communicate to each other how sophisticated we are or how cultured we are or how wealthy we are. Stuff is kind of a language. And so I felt like I needed to become an expert at that language. And over time, I just accumulated more and more and really struggled with ever getting rid of anything. And I think part of it was that no one ever told me that part of my problem with messiness was because I had too much. Like often, I think there was more of a culture of you need to organize better. So I would put a lot of effort into organizing. But at my apartments as a young person, I felt like I always had to cram stuff in back corners and hide the mess and go on a wild goose chase frenzy every time I had friends over in order to kind of keep the stuff at bay. There was a lot of clutter when people weren't over and I would get stressed out by it. I think all the clutter created chaos and would just add to stress in my days, but I didn't know a solution for it. I didn't know how to solve the problem. And then eventually I started getting exposed to minimalism and hearing about those concepts. And so I gradually started doing a few declutters here or there, but I didn't really see an impact. And then I remember one day I was in a closet kind of clearing it out and my husband, Andy, hollered from the other room, Hey, are we ever going to hang out today? You've been doing stuff there in the closet for like hours and I want to spend some time with you. And I realized in that moment, this has just gone way too far. I'm letting my stuff rule my life. I'm spending so much time cleaning that I'm not creating space for the relationships and the people I care about. And it was kind of an aha moment for me. I think it was building over time, but it was just a moment of realizing, hey, I actually need to be more aggressive about my declutters and make a bigger change. And so from there I started doing declutters in various categories of my belongings where I got rid of 50 to even 70 percent of my stuff. And I really saw my life change before my very eyes. I saw that I could save time and put it to better use. I saw that I wasn't as overwhelmed. I didn't have to just spend so much time looking for things or cleaning up things or repairing things or telling myself I'm going to repair things, but not actually repairing those things. I found that as I had less, I felt lighter. I felt less stressed. And I was able to sit back and look at my life and just think more about, is this how I want to be spending my time? And if I'm able to change that, how would I want to spend my time? What would be important to me? Is this the life I want to have? And what does the life I want to have look like? And how could I get there? And so I'm definitely still on that journey. I definitely still have, you know, some bins in some storage areas. And I'm not an extreme minimalist and I'm still learning. But I've found that doing these more significant declutters and being far more thoughtful about what I'm bringing into my home has really just loosened up the stress of life a bit more. And I think it was really impactful when just a little over a year ago, I got an MS diagnosis. I have lots of symptoms that affect me daily, and it's really impacted my quality of life and my ability to just do the everyday things that I used to take for granted, because basically I'm dizzy all the time. Sometimes it's worse than others. And I often experience really extreme fatigue, a different level that just affects me in a way that really pulls me back from being as active, being as productive as I'd like to be at times. And I also have noticed like cognitive changes and other physical things like tingling and numbness in my extremities and just a bunch of really weird symptoms. But what I've realized is I feel almost like it was fate that I found minimalism. I don't really know that I believe in fate, but it just feels like it came into my life at the right time because I don't know if I could have handled the diagnosis and the process of accepting that as smoothly if I hadn't found minimalism just before it happened. And also because I'm just so physically wiped out so much of the time, it's harder to clean up my house and it's harder to take care of just the basics of everyday life. You know, even sometimes just cooking a meal is so much effort for me. But because I have less stuff and I've streamlined various processes, even in the kitchen or, you know, just everyday ordinary tasks, I'm less overwhelmed and it feels more handleable and more doable. So I just want to acknowledge when I talk on this channel, it's coming from a place of really feeling authentic change in my life from trying to pursue minimalism. And I'm not here on some high horse because I used to live with a lot of excess. I loved to collect and I had too much and it really impacted my life in a negative way. But once I started making these changes, it's had rippling positive effects on my life and it just gives me more space for hope for the future. You know that feeling when you're in the middle of a really messy room, sometimes maybe it's even in the middle of cleaning up or doing a declutter and you look around and you're just like, what is happening here? There's so much stuff. I feel like, how am I going to get through all of this? How am I ever going to do this? And I guess once I do some of those declutters and I get through the hard part, I just start to have hope for the future. And that hope turns into energy and that spurs more change. And then I do start to see the change that I was hoping for in the first place. So not that my life is perfect, but I feel like even though my relationship with my stuff sort of ebbs and flows and sometimes I go through periods where I'm collecting a little bit more and then I'm kind of decluttering again and it is this balance and this dance that I'm learning to do, I also feel like I'm seeing those changes and the declutters I did a long time ago are continuing to impact my life today. I recently watched this movie and I don't want to give too much away, so I won't even mention the name of it in case this is kind of a spoiler, but it has to do with two people that are at different points in time and a man at one point plants a tree where he is in time and then the person two years in the future later, the tree suddenly shows up and it's big and it's full and it shows how just one small act he did had rippling effects years later in a way that doesn't feel like a sudden change because it's like as a tree grows, it's just there and you don't really notice it. But I loved that principle that like one small act you can do now can be the seed that grows into something huge and beautiful and impactful even just a couple of years later. And so that's also kind of how I like to think about minimalism, that even small changes we make now might impact our lives in really big ways down the road. Even if we can't see it because we can't see the differences side by side, those small declutters along the way can have rippling effects. And for me, minimalism is about just letting go of the excess and limiting how much I'm collecting so that I can open up my life to the things that I care about. Anyway, that's kind of my minimalism story in wide strokes, but if any of you have similar stories or some of this resonates with you, please let me know your experiences and your thoughts on minimalism and what you do to keep yourself motivated and moving towards decluttering and living with less. I will also say minimalism isn't perfect. There are pros and cons and probably multiple ways to pursue it. And I'm also going to be coming out with a video soon on some of the cons of minimalism, things about minimalism that can be kind of toxic. Once that's live, I'll be sure to add that link at the end of this video as well. But I guess I just think that pursuing minimalism or at least living with a bit less can really improve the quality of your life because I know it has with me. Anyway, thank you so much for spending this little bit of time with me, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Bye.