type_wild | It's not that I have that much stuff, it's just that I have it for all the wrong reasons (Reply)

Four or five years ago, I did a Mari Kondo on my habitat, and got rid of 50-ish DVDs, a good number of CDs, twelve shopping bags worth of clothing, two boxes of kitchen stuff, and a number of books I've since forgotten. I think it was more than a hundred. My home did not feel emptier for it, only tidier, and the only thing I regretted handing off was a Desigual sweater that had been hideously expensive and worn maybe twice in the year since I bought it. I never missed a single thing I carried out; even the sweater was more a matter of being sad about the wasted money and how it was beautiful but it wasn't me.

I don't know what I did wrong to get there, but the last couple of weeks has seen youtube replace my normal dish of musicals, political satire and cooking with bullet journaling which turned into weird lifestyle vids which turned into meal prepping and minimalism. All of which is met with I'm not some coconut oil lovin' youtube housewife, I'm not one of those people while obsessive watching their vids for tips anyway.

And the core tenet of minimalism, the entire "useless physical objects demand your attention and divert your focus from life", is one that is undeniably tempting.

The problem, which I'm sure is in fact what minimalism is philosophically out to solve, is that what is left of my clutter (minimalist lingo for useless physical objecrts) is now mainly things that I feel define me as a person, or at least the person I would like to be.

Tellingly, when I did my Mari Kondo, there was one category of things I couldn't get myself to "purge": My video games, almost all which are as unplayed today as they were then. Because I want to be a person who plays video games, okay, and I keep them around for the day when I surely will finish them all. Because here's the second thing: Video games are stories, and I collect stories.

There were three things to be said about The Island, in terms of books: I lived five minutes away from the library and I ignored it horribly. I worked at a school with its own small library. It was regularly sent some picks of "let the state support niche literature by buying it in bulk and sending it out to schools and stuff", and the librarian was experienced enough to know that the sixteen year olds do not read experimental fiction. Most of those books, as well as the ones purged from the shelves to make way for the latest dystopian YA, where placed on the "help yourself" shelf in the teacher's lounge. The Island was also a pro at flea markets.

A lot of the books I carried out to new flea markets had been picked up from one of these places. Books that looked interesting, classics I knew someone with a degree in literature should be familiar with, stuff I just thought I should know, and I practically got them all for free.

What I actually read was fanfic and comics.

In addition, there were lots of books from post-Christmas bargain sales. Most the DVDs had been similarly low-price editions of films I thought I should've seen, but the thing is, I'm not someone who puts on a film for recreation; I only watch films I particularly want to watch. Out the old Oscar winners went; my anime collection mostly stayed. I had very little sentimentality about my clothes, and I don't even remember what was in the boxes of other knick-knack I donated.

Then I moved, and it all ended up in my dad's loft. Then I moved back, then I moved out, then I moved again - all this within ten months. And with three full bookshelves where I'm living now, I still have a box of books I liberated from the bottom of the closet in my room at my mum's this summer. I can't be bothered going through all the boxes still left in my dad's loft.

I once told one of my sisters that I needed a house with a library. This because I collect stories, becaues I have to collect them. I live in a language community of five million people: The vast majority of things that are published do not stay in print, and a lot of the stories I enjoy are in fact never published here at all. I know that a couple of Discworld novels were published here in the nineties, but good luck finding them at your local library. Only a sliver of non-mainstream comics were ever translated. Anime? Only the merchantise-peddling stuff for kids. If I wanted it, imported goods it was, with the shipping costs and customs that followed. "Just buy it again if you miss it" is not a reasonable option. I've also been doing more than usual of my reading on my Kobo this summer, mostly because yeah no local library of mine will be stocking niche US anthologies and ebooks are cheaper, and the results have not changed since I first discovered the tendency six years ago and later got it confirmed by research: I remember less from e-reading. Like, I finish reading one short story or essay, and by the time I'm three pages into the next one, I'd struggle to describe the one I read before it. I was the kid who'd read my favourite books three times yearly, and I still have that kind of devotion to stories. I hoard my comics and DVDs because so many of them are out of print already and I don't trust streaming services to exist forever, and I can't follow the philosophy of "if it's on Kindle, donate the physical copy". Not only because I won't get a Kindle, but because I can only use it for reading the cheap, silly stuff. If I want a story for keeps, I need a physical copy.

And of course books constitute "clutter" in my home, because they're visible from everywhere, and they're a visual presentation of work not yet done. On my to-do list is to make a list of all my unread books, so that I can make a dedicated effort to read them and then get rid of them.

If I base my identity on the stories I consume, then the identity I wish I were is a person who creates. This is unsurprising: I've wanted to be good at drawing ever since I can remember, and I was writing my first "novel" in first grade. No, I was not the person who bought all the "How to draw manga" books (thank god), but I have... a lot of art equipment. Technical pens, nibs and ink, fineliners, two sets of standard markers, a collection of copics, a smaller collection of cheaper colouring markers handed down from my sister, watercolours, acrylics, brushes, so much washi tape oh god I hate myself, two complete and unopened sets of drawing pencils, a tablet in addition to yes I KNOW christ the pen that came bundled with the Surface on which I'm typing this. Two sets of colouring pencils, a set of metalic ones, glow-in-the-dark crayons, paperclips, rulers, maths equipment from middle school.

And sketchbooks and notebooks aplenty. Because of course I do, of course.

I don't want to be an artist as much as I want to be a person who can make decent drawings, yet the only progress I've made the last ten years is that I my bullet journal look less shit than they did in 2015. And if I should get rid of my books so that I can stop feeling guilty about not having read them, then I should definitely get rid of all my art supplies so that I can pick up my ballpoint pens and get down to the basics. Throw out 90% of all my games so that I can finish playing at least three of them. And Kondo had things to say about stuff like my Go board and my French textbooks and my Japanese textbooks and all the drawing tutorials dutifully saved on my computer.

I suppose it boils down to me being a terribly lazy person who don't in fact want to be all that interesting, just like daydreaming about it.

I have no less than two storage rooms in the basement of the building, and those see-through storage boxes are on sale everywhere these days. I suppose a start might be to put it all away until the day I'm read to admit defeat and just get rid of all the money I've laid onto my dreams of being something more than a boring consumer.