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The Story of My Stuff

by erin |

studio fludd

Last week, during our entire-week-of-snow-days, I did what any snowbound, stir-crazy lady would do: I attempted to purge the entire house of excess in one fell swoop. It didn’t work out as planned, largely due to my own laziness and also in part due to minor protests from the other co-habitants of our home. As it stands, sentimental husbands and irrational toddlers are not fantastic purging partners. Who knew?

Still, I made progress in my head, mentally taking stock of everything I would rid our home of were it my sole decision: DVDs and shoes and sporting goods for people do not “sport.” Folks, there is a wetsuit and surfboard in my garage, smack dab in the middle of a suburban Midwestern neighborhood with no ocean within a one million mile range. (To be fair, it was acquired in Los Angeles during a particularly heavy beach-visiting season, but still, it is time.)

But the worst of it is this: the objects. As a stylist, I have justified the collecting of objects that serve approximately zero purpose: paperweights and decorative journals and patterned accessories, various ephemera that is grabbed from a shelf on a whim as I say to myself, “I could totally use this in a shoot someday.”

studio fludd 3

And I generally do. But then it sits there, collecting dust and eventually selling for 50 cents at my next garage sale. But before it makes it to the garage sale, it moves from room to room in random boxes, preparing space for more clutter and things and stuff that are not adding any shred of value to my life.

I want the cycle to end. I want my home’s objects to reflect meaning and purpose and story. I want to look up and see souvenirs from the happiest moments of my life. I want to write from journals I unearthed in Barcelona, not Target. I want to sit on a footstool discovered in Sweden, not Ikea. I want to wrap myself in scarves I brought home from Ethiopia, not H&M.

I want my home to be so edited that I’ll pick an item at random, and this item will have a story about someone or somewhere or something that shaped me: the typewriter my husband gifted me for Christmas, the book that changed my perspective on adoption, the (glorious) fur coat worn by my grandmother, mildly scented with her signature perfume.

It’s possible. It will take a lot of purging, but more so a lot of will power, specifically when I’m navigating the aisles of Target or fighting the distracting clearance deals online.

studio fludd

I used to shop solely at vintage/thrift stores and wore a lot of hand-me-downs growing up, so it wasn’t rare for me to don items that told many, many stories. And I miss that. I miss that the secrets of my clothing held tales of womens rights and gender roles, even entire industrial revolutions. I long for chairs collected from back alleys on sunny days, for vintage dining tables where hundreds of stories were swapped among families, friends. I miss balancing old mirrors on the shoulders of my husband as we made the trek home from another successful thrift run to furnish our humble, newlywed apartment.

Somewhere along the way, I’ve become lazy. Shopping turned into a leisure activity, a quick fix for a bad day. The store became a getaway when I needed a breath of fresh air from the pressures of a crying baby or a pressing deadline or a tough conversation.

I don’t want my happy place to be Target (no offense, Target – I love you/I hate you). I don’t want my home to boast souvenirs of a successful afternoon shopping in suburbia. I want less.

I want more.

Here’s to our homes containing souvenirs of lives well-lived. Not well-shopped.

Image Credits: Studio Fludd

p.s. Living with less.

  • this is so spot on, i love every word you spoke. i am entirely with you, and inspired by your words. thank you, thank you, thank you! xo

  • wow, i’ve been in much the same headspace this month. i was looking at christmas decorations this year and was saddened by how disposable so much of it is intended to be. i ended up making a few new things instead.

    i’ve also been letting go of other possessions. it hasn’t been easy. but so far i have yet to regret letting go of any of the things i no longer own (which is always the top fear for me when it possession-purging: needing it soon after i get rid of it).

    • Ahhh, I’m so with you re: the push to save in case we’ll need it. And I’m happy to hear I’m not alone in this headspace!

  • Love how you framed this. I wrote a similar piece yesterday about breaking up with Target…though it was about being addicted to cheap shiny objects. Your approach to objects that tell a story (and stories that last) bolsters my desire to have meaningful objects, instead of just “stuff.” I had to laugh though… when I’ve bought notebooks in Italy or France (or even Vancouver), I’ve had trouble using them, because they were so special!

    Thanks for writing this.

  • As I mentioned, I am very glad to have found you/your blog. Our heads are certainly in the same place. Come on over to http://www.mysoulfulhome.com if you need home editing. We are going room to room together until all we have left is what makes us authentic, happy and what we find useful. Here’s to living soulfully with less stuff!
    xx,
    Kelly

  • AMEN. My husband is like the anti-shopper and I think he has secretly trained me over the past 10 years!! Initially, against my will but now I am thankful. ;)

  • I’ve shopped when bored or stressed or anxious. Who hadn’t?

    But a change I’ve made in 2014 is to make a list of what I can do when feeling stressed or anxious INSTEAD of shopping or hanging out on social media. I have it on my desk.

    Things like read a book, take a photo, do five minutes of yoga, draw, look out the window, etc. Like you, I want shopping to be conscious and meaningful.

  • I can relate to this. I really try to do this. Buy less. Get rid of all the overload. I say: try NOT to buy, if you do need something: buy second hand or eco. It works pretty well and i actually got to a point where I simply can no longer buy anything in a h&m. But of course there are weak moments… Especially shopping on the web. As a lover of beauty there is a lot of temptation. I put it on my wishlist and promise myself that I can buy it if I still want it next month. And then most of the time, i don’t find it so nescissary anymore.

  • We’ve been living a vagabond-ish lifestyle for 2.5 years, moving every 3-6 months and living in furnished rentals, and will be at it for probably another 5. Everything we travel with fits into our mid-size SUV. Some rentals are over decorated, with tschotkes (sp?) everywhere, while others have just a few essential pieces of furniture. It’s taught me to live with less stuff and has made me realize that when we do settle down, we only want to be surrounded by the things that we truly need and/or truly love. It feels like such a grown up decision to determine not to need so much stuff.

    Good luck with your purge!

  • This is great, Erin! So inspiring. We just bought a new house, so I have definitely been thinking about this a lot as we shop to fill the house. It feels weird sometimes to be buying stuff to fill the rooms in our house, especially because we got along just fine without it before. But as life does, we move forward and life changes, and so does our story and our needs in our home. I want every room to connote peace and rest in the people that enter our home, and I want it to be rich with stories. Thanks for being so authentic! I appreciate it every day :)

  • A few years ago one of my daughters asked to play with something from “the special shel.” It’s where we keep small pieces-antique aviators, a Don Quixote carved in wood from Madrid–that we received after our grandparents passed. As she asked I realized something, it was so quiet, but insistent: “I don’t find you here.”
    I began letting go of the things I’d kept to hold on to something, someone, or a moment in time. Now I know to listen for whether I find it there when thinking about buying or keeping. Makes the people and emotions I seek so much easier to find.

  • So good. My word for the year iss SIMPLIFY, and this is definitely one of my goals. We are moving to a new home, and I was less. Less distraction, less clutter, just less. I want our new baby to be able to breathe in the calm and not be constantly stimulated by stuff/junk around our house.

  • You are spot on! While I usually purchase only those things I loved, It took me arriving at my empty nest years to figure out that we can live with much less so live with what is important.

  • Love this Erin! My philosophy is: “Do I love it? Do I need it?” if the answer is no it goes. Less…is so much more!

  • Nice one Erin! I used to shop every month, everywhere. Not long after the clothing factory in Bangladesh collapsed, I started to ask myself if I really did need all the clothes. Cheap clothing suddenly looked very suspicious. So in stead, I now buy vintage (coolest prints EVER, for sure) or sew my own clothes. And with the money I save, I try to buy a piece that’s a bit more expensive but that will last longer and makes me appreciate it all the more.

  • Amen, hallelujah, holy mother above. I have been working toward this state of being for the last couple of years and it is not easy, for all the reasons you mention. But it is so worth it. Just the other day I rearranged my living room and purged a few things. Then I re-styled my favorite objects (mostly made by friends or found at thrift stores/garage sales or in nature – all with a story), dusted off the art and photos on the wall, and snipped some blooming red witch hazel from the yard to rest on the coffee table in a favorite vase. Then as I sat back in my beloved 40th birthday (gift to myself) chair and surveyed my tiny empire, I thought “Yes. I love everything about this room.” It’s taken me a long time to get to this place of acceptance.

  • i can’t decide which post to comment on because the last three are just gold. thank you. i went through the same thing the other week, being trapped inside too. instead of getting rid of stuff i made a giant pile for a garage sale and i’ve made a promise to get rid of it, if a garage sale doesn’t happen. because it might now. but there is still so much stuff, sometimes i feel like it is suffocating me…toys especially. but, i’m trying to remember that i won’t be stepping on toys forever and maybe one day i’ll miss stepping on them. but, stuff telling a story. yes….so yes. every meaningful thing in my home that i consider priceless has a story. a sketch of my grandmother, my husbands grandmother’s chair in our room, and rocks i returned with from england. my only struggle is that sometimes i attach stories to random things like stuffed animals….oh, this was that christmas and so on. it can be a real problem.

    happy purging and happy collecting ands story teling!

    xo .t

  • i can’t decide which post to comment on because the last three are just gold. thank you. i went through the same thing the other week, being trapped inside too. instead of getting rid of stuff i made a giant pile for a garage sale and i’ve made a promise to get rid of it, if a garage sale doesn’t happen. because it might now. but there is still so much stuff, sometimes i feel like it is suffocating me…toys especially. but, i’m trying to remember that i won’t be stepping on toys forever and maybe one day i’ll miss stepping on them. but, stuff telling a story. yes….so yes. every meaningful thing in my home that i consider priceless has a story. a sketch of my grandmother, my husbands grandmother’s chair in our room, and rocks i returned with from england. my only struggle is that sometimes i attach stories to random things like stuffed animals….oh, this was that christmas and so on. it can be a real problem.

    happy purging and happy collecting ands story telling!

    xo .t

  • Yes! So true. I also want less. And more. One of my goals this year is to minimize – clutter, waste, thoughtless purchases, anxieties and other burdens of all sorts. This post is right in line with where I’m (hopefully) headed. Can I ask though, which was the book that changed your mind about adoption? Just curious…

  • Every time I’m tempted by an online sale email newsletter, I remember how silly I felt when I purged my belongings before moving across the country and realized just how meaningless so many of my collected objects were. So many times I’ve gotten all the way to the checkout and then chosen to walk away. I remind myself the money I’m spending “just because” could be used to find something REALLY special for my home, or spent on a trip to discover something truly unique. Thanks for writing about this, I know so many of us can relate.

  • THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! So perfectly written. When I find myself fighting over whether I should take that clearance item I remind myself of my new mantra for the year “I have everything I need”. I too want to look around see my home filled with meaningful items and not random clearance stuff I accumulated and I know I will use one day. I needed this extra boost of I can get rid of most of my DVD’s, CD’s, that one pair of jeans I swear I will fit into again one day. To a year of purging and welcoming…if that makes any sense.

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