I keep my e-mail inboxes empty, I delete all my texts before bed, I archive all my Facebook messages, and my calendar is colour-coded. I hate clutter, I am uncomfortable in mess, and when I’m feeling anxious or consumed by things I can’t control, I reorganize and clean. The world may be in chaos, but my drawers don’t need to be. So I throw out and donate with abandon.
I swear I’m not heartless (which sounds like something a heartless person would say). First, because I once asked my therapist if my lack of emotional attachment to things made me too cutthroat (it doesn’t!), and second, because I never learned to weave feelings into things I owned. Neither of my parents like clutter or “things we don’t need,” so I grew up in the belief system that you held onto what you genuinely used and liked, and got rid of the rest. Teddy bears don’t have feelings.
Which sounds harsh, I know. But born from a monthly Friday night tradition with my mom, I learned that keeping things just to keep them wouldn’t help anybody; that a stuffed animal I forgot I had would bring more joy to somebody else who likely wouldn’t keep it stuck on a shelf, getting covered in dust.
So we’d hunker down and decide what I’d keep or give. If I loved or actively liked a toy, it’d stay with me, but thinking too long about what to do would lead to the question of when the last time I played with it was. We’d break for McDonald’s for dinner, then get back to work after McNuggets and fries, and by the time our night was done, my room felt monumentally more spacious and I could justify a new Barbie when I saved up for one.
Because that’s the thing: I didn’t grow up with money. Cleaning out my room wasn’t an exercise in sifting through excess, it was the practice of my parents instilling their own values in me: Clutter stressed them out, and our house was tiny. One jam-packed room made everything feel too-small and oppressive. And while at the start I would’ve happily held onto everything I’d accumulated through birthdays and Christmases and Easters, I slowly learned that getting rid of what you didn’t need could make you feel better, think more clearly. I began looking forward to our Friday night traditions, knowing they’d be followed by a Saturday of cleaning windows and vacuuming. I knew we didn’t have what my friends’ parents did – big-screen TVs, a dishwasher, a second floor, a garage, a fenced-in backyard, a second car – and that money was a source of stress and arguments. But I also knew that my parents still kept me fed and housed and clothed and that I was lucky and loved. Every so often I was allowed McDonald’s for dinner, and that when my most beloved doll broke, my Dad went to the store he found her in and rifled through clearance bins to find a replacement. (And he did it!) My parents did – and still do – what they could with what they had. And their penchant for organization and minimalism gave me my own source of control even when I felt I had none.
So I began to equate cleaning and organizing with a sense of purpose. In fourth grade, I came home from the last day of school before Christmas to find a rented carpet cleaner in the hallway: My Dad had been cleaning the carpets and upholstery, and I immediately felt like we were Fancy™ – not as fancy as the family in I’ll Be Home For Christmas (the movie I’d watched in class that afternoon), but fancy enough. We were cleaning the carpets. The act made me feel worthy of being adopted by the Full House family.
Which wasn’t the eternal vibe, obviously. Where I aspired to be more like my parents as a child, my teen self tried to revel in the opposite. I kept my room messy on purpose to prove how little like them I was and refused to tidy up the computer room after retiring from a night chatting on ICQ (which they quickly reminded me wouldn’t fly if I ever wanted to use the computer again). I could be happy in mess, I’d decided, especially since I felt like one.
And that lasted a few years. As turbulent teens transitioned into even-more-turbulent 20s, I turned to closet clean-outs, reorganization, and getting rid of anything and everything I didn’t love in hopes that my real life would echo my coping mechanism. I used a colour-coded planner, made to-do lists regularly, and alphabetized my books, movies, and CDs (RIP). I dusted, Windex’d, and made regular trips to drop off gifts I’d received but wouldn’t use to Value Village (where I’d end up buying more clothes, but that’s neither here nor there). Purging my closet worked to convince me that I could get a handle on the rest of my life, while forming no emotional attachment to anything other than photos or something belonging to my grandmother made me feel free. By my 30s, I was metaphorically even carpet-cleaning my e-mails. In the immortal words of said grandmother when she was vacuuming one day: Get out of my face.
The thing is, I know my type-A approach isn’t going to solve my bigger problems. I know that real life is messy and complicated and often refuses to be deleted or alphabetized. But it is the illusion that organization brings that means so much. In the same way my parents used cleaning as a means to feel in control, I use it to convince myself of the same. Their techniques were never cruel: Mom and Dad never threw out the crafts or gifts I made (until I was older and I asked why they still kept them and to please get rid of that pencil-holder, for the love of all that is good). They also never forced me to get rid of toys I loved or guilted me for not donating a lot. And in the same realm, I have my own small collection of memories and things I love; of gifts and photos and magnets and trinkets and things my parents gave me. There’s still heart in a minimalist life. It’s just very organized, so you really have to earn a place in it.