minimalism

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.

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.

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.