It’s been almost a year since I paid someone to declutter my house.
This morning I opened the wardrobe, and a suitcase packed with a year’s worth of hoisery fell on my head. That resounding thud jolted be back to my current reality: I am back to being surrounded by stuff.
It’s crept back into my life, not like an insidious cancerous growth, but more like the cute bedraggled neighbourhood cat scratching at the back door. A familiar, comforting yet not always welcome sight.
I have to admit that the minimalist movement got me. To its advocates, decluttering is all about doing away with the unnecessary items in everyday life to find “freedom from the trappings of the consumer culture we’ve built our lives around.” That’s according to Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus of the cult blog ‘The Minimalists.’
WATCH: Is moaning about clutter a first world problem? Post continues…
Indeed everytime I bought an item from the internet, it’s arrival would be announced by the screech of tyres outside my front door, a massive box plonked on the step. Inside that box, would be another box, encased in a mille-feuille of tissues, 10 metres of ribbon, 12 receipts in case I consider returning it… and after much huffing and puffing of uncovering the layers… a teeny tiny 100ml bottle of moisturiser. It’s suffocating.
But then I saw my daughter run across the living room screeching in delight. She scrunched up the tissue paper and stuffed it into her dolls bag. The receipts were transformed into ‘work’ papers that she stracks haphazardly in the corner of her ‘work’ space. The reams of scotch tape were re-imagined into bandages for her injured toys.