Anonymous Minimalist

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Sins of the father, and the mother

February 6, 2015 by vic Leave a Comment

My parents were always obsessed with things. Owning things, saving things, keeping things, and just having more, more, more. It’s funny though, they never cared for what the other was keeping most of the time, they were only interested in what they had.

We moved house a few times when as I got older, and really, I’m not quite sure why. It might have been a bit of “we need a bigger place because we have so much crap” and it also might have been a bit of “keeping up with the Joneses”. The thing is, if they had chosen to keep the house I first remember, and they sold it today, they’d be multi millionaires, and the Joneses would be trying to keep up with them. As it is, we moved house 3 times before my parents called it quits and spilt everything down the middle. Their split wasn’t much after they’d paid off all their debts for all the stuff they owned and owed and now they’re both quite miserable. Or so it seems to me.

My Dad lives in a shed, or glorified granny flat at the back of some persons property out in the sticks. Just him and the landlords chickens and his aging dog.  My mum lives in a rented house that is lovely and quaint, but it has an outdoor toilet, is freezing cold, has the stove top from hell, and rests itself upon 1/2 and acre of grass – that requires regular mowing. Something she can’t keep up with.

Both of them in their old age, in their retirement, are still working, still struggling, and still have nothing. Not even each other. It’s quite heartbreaking to see them that way, and to be able to look at them and see all the what ifs, and the different decisions they could have made, and know that if they had probably taken any of the 100 other paths they might have, things would probably be very different for them now.

The only advantage to having watched them fail so miserably, and to see them so lonely now, is to hopefully be able to apply what I’ve learned from watching them to my own life, and not make the same mistakes they did.

I often wonder if they hadn’t focused so much on consuming, on wanting other people to perceive them as wealthy and well off, and clever and all those things we all seem to want, if their marriage would have survived. If they might have actually had a relationship with each other, and not just lived in the same house. I suppose I am only on the outside looking in, and I’ll never really know, but any kid can recognise when their parents don’t really like each other. I think it was more my mother who got angry, my father just never noticed in time enough to change the outcome.

I think that things, pretty shiny, lovely things, they weigh us down. They make us heavy, they make us blind to life. Blind to the life we want and could be living, if we would only stop wanting stuff, and just wanted each other.

Posted in: minimalism Tagged: old news

Things I have Thrown Away

February 5, 2015 by vic Leave a Comment

Since the start of January, I have gotten rid of a mountain of belongings. Things I don’t need, never use, don’t fit me, I don’t wear, things I don’t even know why I had. Most of it completely useless junk.  It’s only been a month but this stuff was just so meaningless to me that I literally can’t remember everything I’ve tossed / donated.

So far I’ve worked over the bathroom, the kitchen, my wardrobe, the linen cupboard, my office, the garden shed, the laundry, the lounge room.

I’d say I’ve gotten rid of everything I can get rid of for the bathroom, the linen cupboard, the laundry and the garden shed.

My wardrobe – There is 2 dresses and a shirt I no longer wear that I should get rid off. The dresses are super nice though, one is designer, I should probably sell it. The shirt was a gift from my husband, but it’ll look like its a size 20 on me. I’m a size 8 – 10. It was a pre weight loss shirt and meant to be loose fitting, hence it now being rather tent like.

My office. I’m sure there is loads of little officery things I dont use that need chucking. As soon as I chuck them though, I know I’ll need them. Annoying.

The lounge room. Has a mish mash of stuff I hate in it. Some of it not mine so I can’t do anything about it, except glare resentfully.

The kitchen. Always has some new wonderful thing in it that needs to get out of my house now.

Today I emptied a storage cupboard. Now all it has in it is my husbands stuff (quite a bit of stuff) and the only thing left in there that’s mine is a pair of gumboots. I rocked at throwing stuff out today. I also listed a bunch of stuff on gumtree.

 

This month, I’ve paid an extra $260 off our loan from selling things. And we’re only 5 days in! Yippeee!!

 

 

Posted in: minimalism Tagged: new news

A minimalist history

February 5, 2015 by vic Leave a Comment

Growing up I never really hoarded belongings, well I don’t remember ever doing so. I’m fairly certain my wardrobe wasn’t terribly expansive, as a teen in the 90’s I dressed pretty much solely in a band t shirt, a pair of levi’s and doc marten boots.

I didn’t hang on to old photos of boyfriends, or love letters, or gifts, and if I didn’t wear an item of clothing anymore it got turfed. Even my CD collection was subjected to being worked over every month or so as I sold them or traded them for new ones.

I remember moving out of home, and all of my belongings fitting in the back of a ute. And that included everything I needed to furnish my new flat.

I loved the freedom of not having things I really needed to take care of. I spent my time doing stuff, not looking after stuff, and I could easily have walked away from all of it without too much fuss. In fact a few times I’m pretty sure I did move house without most of it!

As an adult, I’ve accumulated a lot of crap. I live in a 3 bedroom house, which has a large basement / study and it’s pretty choc a bloc to the rafters. It has excellent storage, with built ins in every bedroom. It’s why we rented it, and one of the many reasons I resent my stuff. Because we have to cart it around with us. Ugh. Such a drag.

I’ve always appreciated minimalist decorating. I love walking into a home (or looking at pictures) where the place is decorated, shows of the persons style, but also doesn’t have lots of things in it. A wall of books frightens me. It’s just too many. I look at it and stress out over someone having to pack those things in boxes and lug them around when they move, and dust them, and read them. Does anyone read all the books in their collection all the time? I think not. I’d bet people have about 10 favourite books that they read every couple of years, maybe even only 1 of them a year. Dvd, video, record, and cd collections also fill me with the same amount of angst. It’s stressful just writing about it.

Even worse is novelty collections. Like action figures. Or ceramic cats. Magazines, newspapers, old mail, my god I think I might be about to have a fit.

Houses with paintings hung all bunched together, and some of them are crooked. Fuck me, I can’t be in the same room as it.

I don’t wear a lot of jewellery, or even own very much of it. It’s just such an effort! You’ve gotta put it on, take it off, take care of it, insure it, and most of the time you don’t wear it, or worse you never wear it, because you own so many bits of shiny crap to hang on yourself, you never get the chance to. Just get rid of it, why even own it in the first place?

All of these things, I’ve felt like this my whole life. Well for as long as I can remember.  Reading about minimalism in the past few weeks has made me realise that maybe I’ve been a minimalist all along. Just a pretty crappy one.

 

 

Posted in: minimalism Tagged: old news

New Year New You

February 1, 2015 by vic Leave a Comment

Late 2013 I looked in the mirror. I actually looked at myself. I had been avoiding the mirror ever since having a child. It started out like that because I would look and see how tired I was. So so tired. Then I stopped looking because I was just unhappy with how I looked, and I didn’t want to see myself, and see the person I had become, both physically and emotionally.

I looked in the mirror in November 2013 and I hated myself.  I actually really disliked myself as a person, as well as how I looked. Due to some incredibly painful and stressful things happening in my personal life I had started drinking. A lot. I was drinking perhaps a bottle of wine a night, and eating all the time.

I wasn’t eating foods that were too bad for me, having ditched most processed foods in previous years. But I still ate biscuits (my biggest dowfall, scotch finger biscuits are just freaking amazing), and I’m ashamed to say visited the McDonald’s drive thru more frequently than I should have. It wasn’t a huge part of my life, but those hash browns are just so damn addictive. (or were, its been over a year since i ate one).

That day, I decided that I didn’t want to hate myself anymore, and I’d be damned if I didn’t wake up to myself and do something about it. So I walked the 1.3km to the gym pushing my son in the pram, and signed up. Just walking that far was an accomplishment. Think of the laziest person you know, and then double their laziness. That’s how lazy I was.

I threw myself into working out and dieting. It was pretty brutal. I worked out 6 days a week and restricted my diet to 1200 calories or thereabouts a day. Best of all though, I pretty much stopped drinking. Well I stopped drinking every day.

It was surprisingly difficult to go from lots of drinks, to nearly no drinks. I had thought that alcohol really had no hold over me, but by the end of the day I’d be itching for a glass of wine. It was such a crutch, and I’d think about how good it was going to be when i could drink my (cheap cask wine) at a socially acceptable hour.

After a few weeks of near killing myself at the gym while starving myself, not drinking became pretty easy. If i drank and then got up at 6am and went to the gym, it made my workout harder. It was hard enough without being hungover, so drinks got sent to fri / sat nights only. Now they’re for the most part, once a week and never really more than 2  – 3 glasses. Occasionally I have a blow out, but alcohol is no longer a crutch for me. Yes I like to drink, but I recognise it for what it is, I generally feel pretty shit afterwards, and i’m still hopeless at working out if I do it. it slows me down, which is NOT compatible with my competitive nature.

Something wonderful began to happen to me when I looked in the mirror and made the decision to change myself;  I followed through on it. Yes I lost weight. But I also gained so much more.

I gained in no particular order:

  • More patience
  • More Confidence
  • More love
  • More excitement
  • More joy
  • More life

By Christmas 2013 I had lost 3kg. I then put it back on with some xmas feasting and the most incredible wedding spread you’ve ever seen at a mate’s festivities, but I was on my way. I was looking at my life and habits with new eyes and I knew that I had to change. It wasn’t just about vanity anymore and how I looked on the outside to myself and to other people, it was about being who i always wanted to be and was always too afraid, or too lazy to become.

 

 

Posted in: minimalism Tagged: old news

The prompt to live more meaningfully (that I recognised)

February 1, 2015 by vic Leave a Comment

Last year I sporadically followed the blog of a woman named Sash Milne, who writes Inked in Colour. I followed her story, and her decision to buy “nothing new” for a year.

At first I think I was a little frightened but also amazed at what she was doing and her choice to radically change her lifestyle, and to refocus it and to live without buying anything. It sounds really hard. Well sounded really hard. Now I feel like it’s probably something I might be able to tackle at some point in my life, but I guess I feel like I don’t need to be quite so extreme to reap the same benefits she did.

So, I said to myself, “right anonymous, that is pretty amazing, surely you can be more conscious of what you buy and how you live your life”. I chose to try and only buy handmade things. I actually totally bombed at this project. Yes i bought more handmade and supported local artisans more than I ever have before in my life. I did finally place a much higher value on something that I recognised someone had spent their time crafting.

I also bought a lot of stuff that you can get at your local Myer. I’m a sucker for Myer. I typically hate shopping, particularly for clothes and things like that. It always takes SO LONG and they never have my size, and everything is too gaudy and it just. drags. on. But I also hate spending the entire day wandering the streets of fitzroy hoping I can afford the local fashion, and also that I can squeeze into it. So i hit up Myer, I buy jeans, and tee shirts and underwear and I get the hell out of there.

Towards the end of 2014 as I looked around at all my stuff, and thought about the things I had already been purging (my entire old wardrobe, but that’s a different story), I began to realise how much I hate buying things I don’t need. Like the expensive dress hanging in my closet right now. It’s beautiful and I do love it, but I bought it to wear to a single event that according to society I have to dress a specific way for, and I despise being told what to do, or how to dress. While buying the dress I also bought a pair of high heels, some stockings, some earrings and a shiny bag thing.

It was a really strange experience because while I was buying this stuff, I was loving it, and resenting it at the same time. I love my outfit, I look hot in it. But i resent my outfit, because it cost me $600. To lessen my resentment for the “outfit”, I decided while I was buying it, that it would be the last dress I buy for the foreseeable future. It is my everything dress. It is for weddings, it is for funerals, it is for my husbands work parties, it is for any other event that I am forced to wear a dress for. (I’m not a dress person).

This is getting quite long winded but I am getting closer to my point, I promise. The one thing in my life I will never succeed in being a minimalist at is talking or spewing forth my thoughts in any medium.

The second thing that made me really question myself, my lifestyle and my spending was this. For one month, my husband and i wrote down every cent we spent. And we realised that we SUCK at budgeting. We suck at it in different ways, but we both suck. I think we spent about 3K more that month that we earned. Some of it on cool stuff like the 2 for 1 airfares we bought to Japan, but some of it just on crap we don’t need.

No wonder we are always struggling, we have trouble saving, etc etc. We just waste all of our hard work earning a living, to spend it on – not living.

So i thought about it, and I thought about it and I just kept on thinking, “what if I don’t buy anything I don’t NEED? Can I do that, am I capable of doing that, should I do that?”

So that is what I am doing. It’s like anything, easier said than done. But, this is it. Life is SHORT. I want to do shit, not buy shit.

 

Posted in: minimalism Tagged: recent news

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  • Sins of the father, and the mother
  • Things I have Thrown Away
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