september's coming soon

There's this idea that your "someday"-things cause bad conscience and stress, and ultimately procrastination. The language-learning book you never finished, the books you never read, the games you haven't played. For me, add the art equipment rarely used, and a shitton of bullet journal BS that I just couldn't make look as good as simple black lines and highlight markers. And the keyboard I don't practice my chords on and the books of songs I've never played, the sewing machine I ultimately never used for all the fancy DIY stuff, and for years now, the spinning wheel I inherited from my grandmother.

The idea is that they feel bad becaues we know we should be using them. I should be reading the ninetysomething unread books, I should be studying French vocabulary, I should be using one of the three different sets of coloured pencils, not to speak about the unopened sets of plain drawing pencils. I should be playing one of my fifty handheld games, I should be watching one of the eight unwatched anime box-sets, or my Crunchyroll queue, or the three or so reasons I subscribed to HBO for a while, and let's not talk about all my half-finished fanfic.

If I was serious about minimalism, the sewing machine and the keyboard would go instantly, along with the eight years worth of sheet music from two different ensembles and one choir, the six-ish music books and the pile of printed and photocopied piano music, two different sets of watercolour and six tubes of acrylic paint, a ton of pencils too soft for writing, a Japanese-German dictionary, a "teach yourself French" book (also in German), six shelves of books, a food processor cum blender, a Wii, two DVD players, a GBA, a DS Lite, a 3DS, a typewriter, a shameful amount of markers and fineliners and gel pens.

In the pits of self-improvement reddit, there is a vision of my life where I keep only a tightly curated collection of books and DVDs; my pile of notebooks is gone, replaced with a single one, and a single sketchbook in which I draw with one of the fine ballpoint pens that has been my go-go art equipment for a decade and half. My harddrive is emptier. My three different online bookmarking systems are tidier. I practice my clarinet.

Our things are our identity, and it's telling, isn't it, that I could throw out half my wardrobe and cooking utensils and dishware and knick-knacks and curtains with no problem. But when it gets close to the creative side - the things I want to make, the art I want to consume - I find it deeply uncomfortable to resign myself to the fact that yeah, I'll need five years to get it all done, and should just spare myself the bad conscience of everything undone and throw it out and forget about it, already.

A small-ish step in the right direction is that I did sit down with the spinning wheel and having spun the two wheels of wool my grandmother left behind, now find myself wanting more. (though this comes with the downside of getting rid of the yarn I make, because I've got enough yarn lying around from before ha ha ha )

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.

( And now they're piling up and I'm a horrible person )