red winkle picker regret and the dark side of decluttering
Saturday, October 2, 2010 Get rid of your stuff. It's all the rage. Has been for at least the
last 10 years - and it's only growing. There are books, magazines,
blogs, professions devoted to it. Maybe you jumped on the bandwagon
because all the cool kids are doing it.
I have decluttering DNA. I've been doing it since long before our
culture began worshiping at the church of the purge. Long before there
were books, magazines, blogs, and Oprah shows devoted to it. Growing
up, decluttering and organizing the hallway closet (my family's chosen
junk repository) was one of my favourite stress-busters. When I was done
- ah! I had restored control and order to one tiny little spot of the
world.
I have no doubt I inherited this from my dad – who so loves to declutter
that we have numerous family stories about him throwing out something
valuable or treasured in one of his decluttering frenzies. Like one Christmas when he
was so quick to clean up the wrapping remnants that he tossed out a
present I bought for my sister that she hadn’t even opened yet. And then there was the Bay City Roller records incident - I still can't go there.
Now
decluttering has gone mega mainstream. It's almost religious. It's
rarely questioned. There are gurus and gospels to follow. Salvation
shall be yours through decluttering.
It's something my clients often want to work on - and no surprise
that it is often an essential part of many coaching programs. Now, I
have nothing against decluttering in and of itself. I just think when
anything becomes unquestioned, it's time to start asking questions. When
I started questioning, I noticed something - The Religion of
Decluttering is the kissing cousin of The Religion of Thinness.
Both have at their core the original sin of too-much-ness. Both
have congregations that are filled with a large majority of women (no
surprise since the teachings are largely directed at women). Both have
their morality tales (Hoarders, Clean Sweep, Biggest Loser). Both have had me as a devoted member.
And, I will audaciously claim, both of them have a well-hidden
shadow side that is about pathologizing the feminine in favour of celebrating the
masculine. Think about it - bodyfat is inherently feminine because of it's necessity for
pregnancy and childbirth. Yet women with uber-low body fat percentages
are admired (even though many of them stop menstruating). Gathering
beauty, making a cozy home, aka nesting- no matter whether it's done by a
man or a woman - is an activity flavoured with the feminine. Yet
shelter porn makes us think that a lived in house is unattractive. Think of the energy of throwing out and discarding compared to the energy of taking in and welcoming.
I call this the attack on the breasts and nests - part of a subtle
backlash against the re-balancing of the feminine and masculine. It
asks us to detach from our inner feminine knowing and give in to a
higher authority. Many of us (me included) buy into this without even
realizing what that we are giving away a part of ourselves. It feels so
easy to think somebody has the answer.
There are some other really obvious reasons why the declutter cult has taken off -
1. Control - In a world that seems out of control, decluttering and
organizing can provide an illusion of control. (This is my hall closet).
2.
Guilt - as the world continues to shrink, we can more and more see how
our unconscious consumption is linked with developing world living
conditions and climate change. To purge our possessions can feel like a
cleansing confession. (Go in peace and sin no more - and throw in three
Hail Marys for good measure.)
3. Perfection/Salvation - all my problems will be solved, my life
will be perfect and I will find eternal happiness when I get rid of all
my clutter and get organized. (This is a variation on "I will be happy
when I am skinny.")
4. Freedom - getting rid of stuff can give us a temporary hit of feeling free. When our lives feel full of obligation, this is alluring.
When you dig deeper into any of these, you will likely find fear.
And if you do have a lot of junk in your life and dig into why you ended
up with it in the first place - guess who's coming to dinner? - fear.
So if you are purging from the same mindset that you had while procuring
- well, that's just the other side of the same coin, honey.
As a depth coach, I'm not interested in surface changes that
aren't accompanied by an inner shift. If you don't look at the
underlying thoughts beneath the desire to declutter -
then you may just end up a serial declutterer like I was (I also have a great history as a yo-yo dieter).
My invitation to you if you want lasting change is to let go of the
declutter mindset - a variation on the diet mindset. Both are just
hollow pursuits of something we think will make us happy. Both ask us to
embrace a masculine paradigm based in external control. Move to a
place of letting go consciously. Be aware of the shadow side. Take the
time to reflect and do it from a place of loving creation, not fear.
Letting go is part of the conscious creation of the life you want, not a
scramble for salvation or perfection. My experience is that when you
are living from the place of loving, conscious creation you will
naturally and effortlessly begin to let go of that which is no longer
serving you - it will be a process, not a project. And you will
discover what is worth keeping and what is worth adding to your life in the first place.
A story. When M and I left the prairies for the coast we put all out
belongings into our little blue Dodge Colt hatchback. A perfect
opportunity for me to go on one of my crazy fling-fests. Not conscious,
not thoughtful, not self-aware. In the process I gave away a pair of
red patent leather winkle pickers to the little girl across the street
to put in her tickle trunk.
The shoes were one of the few things I had that belonged to my
dead mother. As I grew up without her, I would occasionally pull them out and stand in them - my way of feeling connected
to her. I would imagine she was there in my bedroom with me, smiling
down at me. Bending over and kissing me on the cheek. I would imagine her wearing them as she rocked me as a baby. It helped me feel
less alone. As the years passed, I grew into the shoes - they fit me
perfectly when I gave them away. And that scared me a little. Like
Annie Gallup's song about her mother's blue dress:
And I'm not sure I ever meant to grow into this dress for real
As much as I rehearsed it I still don't know how to feel
In your blue dress on a summer night when I turn the page
And step into a photograph of you when you were my age
For all the time gone by and everything I've grown into
Sometimes being me feels like pretending to be you
In your blue dress
I used to like your blue dress and I still do, but in a different
way
I like the inkstain on the skirt and how the hem is frayed
I see it on a different scale and from a different angle now
Than when I'd look up at you looking down
In your blue dress on a summer night, going out for the evening
Well, I still cry sometimes when I think about you leaving
Me
Your blue dress
I miss those shoes. Of course, I've done okay without them, but many times I have yearned to slip my feet
into them again. I gave them away thoughtlessly, carelessly. At the
time, there was no practical reason to keep them.
But I know
this about myself, now - I cannot live with practical alone, my life
needs poetry. I am sensual - having things to touch and feel makes me
feel connected. I am nostalgic - it is important to me to have some
articles from the past, to feel a sense of the history of my life. Some
of my belongings bring me great joy. I don't fear that attachment.
Knowing this, I am able to temper my urge to purge. Now when I let go,
it is a letting go from a place of self-knowledge and love, not a place of fear and false belief.
The point is to know yourself well enough so that whatever you do,
it is right for you. Follow your intuition. Learn from others, but live from your own heart.
Just after hitting publish on this, Tara pointed me to the this post by Natalie Baker on Bindu Wiles' site - which I love, love, Iove and expresses so eloquently some of what I was trying to convey here.
Reader Comments (26)
Though I've done a fair bit of healthy decluttering over the years, I am also very much attached to certain things because of the way they make me feel. Like my dad's old bottle of Old Spice after shave that still sits on my shelf - I open it up now and then and a whiff of that sends me right back to childhood.
Never, ever—EVER—am I an advocate for the quick fix. My own credo for many years now has been the wonderful Beverly Sills quote: "There are no shortcuts to any place worth going." Not that I was ever looking to angle out of hard work; it's just that for most of my life, I thought I should be getting there faster, wherever "there" was.
While I talk about this quite a bit on my blog, my own clutter-clearing has neatly coincided with the very au courant mania for it and I can totally see how it looks like I might be an advocate for heedless pitching. Also, I'm kinda butch. :-)
But really, no. Not at all. I've been rolling the idea of letting go around in my head for the past 15 years at least. Seriously—the house I'm staying at has copies of most of Elaine St. James' "simplicity" books, and one I just checked this morning had a copyright date of 1994!
I can't speak for the "cool kids" (and really, I am not EVEN a "cool kid," but thanks—I think...), but I'm f*cking old—almost 50—and the end of the line in my family. As I've said before, all the sh*t slid downhill and landed in my closets and under-bed storage spaces. I have become the vast repository of all that my family accrued and never looked at again, all of their stories, hopes, dreams and—god help us all—the physical mementos. I love them, but loving all of them has slowly become overwhelming.
Also, I've been gently weeding and culling for years, though I never really thought to talk about it. Plus, I was also acquiring. I mean, that's what we do: we take on, we shed. But I'd neglected much of the natural shedding for the two years leading up to January of this year for a few personal reasons, and had become stuck and crowded. Thus, it became necessary to unstick, and to create MORE ROOM, this year's theme. (You just have more stuff if you make it to 50 and come from a line of pack rats. You just do.)
There's no way I would get rid of everything! I love stuff. Austerity doesn't move or comfort me. But yes, I've come to question attachment. You can't get halfway to 100 and stare your mortality in the face and not.
Basically, I'd echo what you and the (excellent) post you linked to have said: thoughtfulness is what we're after. Are you awake, and enjoying your wonderful things? Or are you surrounding yourself with sleeping pills in the form of stuff?
Finally, there are seasons, right? I mean, literally: in fall, in full-season climates, there's a shedding. Then a growing. But people live in other climates, where there is not a shedding, and other people live in a different hemisphere, where the shedding/blooming comes at a different time.
So what you closed with is really the thing: pay attention to what YOU need, and learn your OWN owner's manual.
(Thanks for letting me ramble on. More fun doing it elsewhere, sometimes, than on my own blog.)
For me, with the shoes, I have a few pics of my mother wearing them, but looking at a picture could not compare with the way I felt when I actually had them on my feet. Maybe it was some woo-woo energy stuff or maybe it was just the power of my imagination - but it was an alchemical feeling.
I have another post about how I moved from serial declutterer to conscious culler and I have you in there as a great example - I love how you are sending your objects off into the world with their stories. I've been wondering if we tend to accumulate so much stuff because most of the objects we acquire are so story-less, so empty.
So thank you for your example and thank you for your comments here - they add so much. xo
And really, I have to thank you for giving me the opportunity to be explicit about the process elsewhere. You added an excellent point in this last comment: finally giving birth to these stories embedded in the treasures makes it much, much easier to let them go. There's still a tug, here and there, but that's always instructive to notice, too.
Finally, I don't at all think you're a clumsy communicator in writing! I admit, I bristled both at being lumped in with any cool kids (I mean, really—no WAY, it's everything I fight against!) and was stung a bit by the notion that I was just living out my part of some bigger trend. And yeah, it IS a trend, or it's a trendy thing to look at, and that probably has a lot to do with consumer patterns since the 1980s. Explosion of cheap goods, encouragement to buy more/better/bigger (remember the "most toys" bumper stickers, or are you too young?), plus a meltdown? Well, we can't afford to buy now, plus we've learned all those things didn't protect us from anything, PLUS-plus, sadly, with some of the forced downsized some people are going through—bam. Trend.
I am a staunch fan of Hoarders, though, and Randy Frost's work. "Stuff" is a terrific book that really gets at the "why" behind a lot of it. So much of it's wiring, a lot of which I have. Plus environment (cf. packrat incubation for 18 years), plus consumer culture. I'm a cheap-ass and I have too much stuff!
Thank YOU for thinking and talking more about this stuff. And we'll both be more careful with our words moving forward, which is always a good thing.
I wish I had inherited the gene. LUCKILY, I do not enjoy shopping, thus my stuff is somewhat limited.
And, as a (very bad coach who said this one good thing) reminded me "you will never get your ducks in a row". We all, women especially, keep waiting for the day when a clean house, thin body, detailed car, paid bills, shiny kids, groomed pet, thank you cards, knitting projects (feel free to continue...) will all be complete simultaneously-as if life were like that.
Thanks for the reminder that is letting go with breath and generosity-not with yearning for perfection.
Love you my dear.
This is my first ever comment here, and it's so serendipitous that I visited your blog today. I, too, have been thinking a lot about this shift to a distinctively feminine wisdom but yet I often am faced with the ingrained masculine way of thinking and so applies to this cult of decluterring. I was writing about this in my blog, and this connection to how we use stuff and food to mask our true unmet needs, and how telightening that the opposite can also be true. I don't know if I am making sense but all this to say, I get you and what you are saying and how life giving it feels to resonate with your words. Thank you for sharing your wisdom,
Light and love,Vina
First things first, bringing up the ties between the decluttering mindset and diet mindset is really insightful on your part...not something I had thought about. And I think you're right on the mark about people embracing what they see as Minimalism (more on this in a second) because of the perceived need to suffer in order to be morally balanced.
That being said, the predominant definition of Minimalism is misused here, the same as it's misused almost everyplace I've seem it mentioned lately.
It's true that getting rid of stuff just to get rid of stuff is silly and trendy, and all over the Internet I've been seeing the 'backlash against Minimalism' articles popping up, and rightfully so, based on what they think Minimalism is; online the most visible aspect of Minimalism is the drastic reduction of possessions in order to own as little as possible.
What Minimalism is REALLY about, however, is streamlining your life so that your passions are front-and-center while things that don't add value are stripped away.
Said another way, it's about removing the deadwood so that you have more time, resources and energy to spend on what's important to you, whatever that may be.
For example, if collecting antique unicorns is what really makes your life worth living, it would be a terrible philosophy that tells you to get rid of those poor unicorns so that you'll feel more pure of heart. Keep the unicorns! And get more of them!
A true Minimalist would tell you to embrace your passions (even the unicorn-related ones), and in order to support them and free up more time/money/energy for them, take a look around and see if there's anything you're spending on that you DON'T get value from (and get rid of them).
Unfortunately, this isn't a side of the philosophy that's talked about very often (it isn't quite as newsworthy...if it bleeds, it leads, you know), so most people I talk to only know about the extremist version.
If you are applying the real thing, it really is one of those ideas that has little in the way of downsides.
Like anything, though, dogmatism and extremism result in the opposite of what you want to achieve, and as you very accurately described, going overboard or doing it for the wrong reasons have all the earmarks of an unhealthy addiction.
my word for this year is 'shed' - and i meant it metaphorically as well as literally. now its kind of ben co-opted into something that i didn't intend.
for me this is about cleared out mind-clutter and feeling more powerful. As well as my tendency to fill my time up with action and things to do when i am feeling out of sorts (rather than deal with the out of sorts).
we have moved to a smaller house (which economically is a no-brainer) and we sold a bunch of stuff that we didn't need in a smaller house. but i still took me to the new house. and the control, guilt, freedom stuff is still there. I am very accepting of my imperfections!
the shed to me is a gentle space - a quiet feminine energy that substantiates my world. it has to have stuff in it!
all the best xox Linda
There's a huge difference between, say, cultivating a habit of loving exercise out of care and respect for our bodies versus pushing our fingers down our throats after every meal.
One is an act of self care, while the other... well, there's nothing caring about violent self-denial.
For the most part, I reject the word 'minimalism' because I think it's too often taken in the direction you describe, and that's no healthier than a house piled to the ceiling with old newspapers and saved sachets of ketchup. As Colin has said here, the point is not just to have as little as possible, but to have the space for what matters, and that's going to look different for everyone.
We can go about clearing (or not clearing) in a way that's gentle, mindful, and respectful. We can find the sweet spot where we feel supported and delighted by our surroundings rather than stressed or overwhelmed by stuff (too much or too little).
And the best part is that we don't all have to squeeze ourselves into the same sweet spot, just like we don't all have to wear the same size jeans.
xo
I'm a huge proponent of getting rid of the shit--but can definitely see where fear plays a role. Fear of settling, fear of growing older, fear of "my life is over if I stop moving."
It's about denying the advertisements and constant messages from society that we are not enough, we do not have enough, we are not good enough - but we can be if we buy more stuff, different stuff, stuff that will solve our problems. It is saying: I am enough, right now, whoever I am, whatever I have. I am enough. If that is not deeply meaningful for women, I don't know what is.
It's about affirming that less really is more: the less junk you have, the less time you have cataloging, organizing, and worrying about your possessions - the more time and energy and space you have to devote to what matters to you most, whatever that is.
As a woman, my efforts to live a more simple and less cluttered life have been deeply meaningful.
Beautiful. I concur.
This post is very well-said, too. (:
Things have meaning, and as you so eloquently pointed out, when you're in the right space, you'll naturally let them go, or not.
I loved a recent post by Julie Roads on Upcycling (taking meaningful pieces and remaking them) -- http://writingroads.com/blog/2010/08/reason-4638-to-hire-a-copywriter-upcycling/
"The point is to know yourself well enough so that whatever you do, it is right for you. Follow your intuition. Learn from others, but live from your own heart."
For me, decluttering has been a saving grace. It has given me freedom and space that had been unavailable to me for years, literally and figuratively. It took me a long time -- no quick fix here -- to finally face what was cramped and full and just wrong for years and to get rid of what wasn't serving me, what I didn't love and what didn't represent the best me I want to be.
I think some of what you are saying (please correct me if I am wrong) is that decluttering itself is not the issue, but the "everyone else is doing it and therefore so should I" aspect of it is what is at issue. And I wholeheartedly agree. Nothing should be done for those reasons.
Thank you for this.Allison