Decluttering Myself: Going Beyond my Messy Closet
By: Daniel Pohl
Tags: Minimalism, Healing, Life Lessons, Decluttering, Mental Health

Photo Credit: Daniel Pohl

What do you have once you get rid of everything? Once the excess clothing has been donated and the clutter left on the curb? You’ve deleted your social media apps from your phone, unsubscribed from 49 different email lists, and you canceled the streaming services you forgot you had, what’s left?

There won’t be much, in most cases, but you can take stock of everything that remains.

Some of you might know that line, everything that remains. It’s one that was made popular by The Minimalists. Recently, I’ve started thinking about that phrase and what it means to me.

“Everything that remains”.

In the physical sense, there is a lot of freedom in these words. Everything physical that remains can fit in my Ford Fiesta. Everything except my couch. I can work around that.

What about the rest? What about the doubts and fears that rested under the clutter? All the mental fatigue and emotional exhaustion that created the clutter in the first place.

That all remained as well. Only now I couldn’t bury them in purchases and followers. I would have to sort through them, separate them and decide what should go and what should remain. There’s a certain hesitance in facing your insecurities. I guess that’s why we bury it beneath so many things.

I had to declutter the one closet I fought so hard to keep closed. There were painful truths and memories hidden within it. If I was going to declutter, truly declutter, that closet had to be opened. I’d have to face it all.

You wouldn’t know this, reading my words, but I wrote a suicide note once. It wasn’t a pretty one either. It was full of pointed fingers and angry words.

“You laughed at my speech impediment, now you get to take responsibility for this”.

That was the basic idea of it. Please don’t worry, my last thoughts on the subject were years ago. I’ve grown a lot since then and I plan on being around for a while.

That doesn’t change the fact that I wrote it and thought about it. Looking back, I don’t think I could have ever gone through with it. The fact remains, the thought and reason existed, and I carried it with me for years. I kept it buried under ideas of success. That if I could get to that $100,000 salary, I’d finally be happy. That $100,000 salary would prove I was something more. Something besides that depressed, broke soul, sitting in the break room at Food Lion while managers and coworkers laughed at him.

That $100,000 paycheck never came, but the happiness did.

Everything that remains, isn’t just about the things that mean something to you. It’s about the things that you buried. More than that, it’s facing them, embracing them, and letting go of them. It’s finally accepting that the worst parts of you, you don’t let them define you. My Impediment, something I have fought against for longer than I remember, no longer defines me. Much like the things I own, I am in control of it. I can’t change it, but I can choose how it affects me. I get to decide how it factors into my life.

Want to know a secret?

It hasn’t factored into my life at all.

It was only after decluttering the mental closet that I realized how little it mattered. I will give myself a little credit. When classmates, coworkers, and managers made it a point to laugh at it, accepting it became an uphill battle. In the end, it was still a battle I won, and I won it through accepting it.

Everything that remains. That was terrifying once, but now it’s reassuring. Everything that remains, physical, mental, and emotional, benefits me. At the least, it doesn’t stop me.

Please don’t take this as a simple task. You have your battles to fight and demons to accept, and it won’t always be easy. Please know, however, that it is possible. I know this because I’m here still to write this.

More than anything, know you don’t face it alone. I’ll leave my email below. Feel free to reach out to me. Tell me what it is that you need to declutter, and we can work on it together.

Danielsmodernlife@gmail.com

Thanks for reading.