How To Love Something You Hate
The steps I take to improve my life.
With a second baby on the way, I’ve been in hardcore nesting mode.
But this only came after desperately trying to find a better home to move into. In fact, last year, I began to daydream about getting a bigger house for a growing family, before I fell pregnant.
I started to see every single crack and mark on the walls in our current home, and things randomly started breaking — the washing machine stopped spinning, the dishwasher no longer heated our water, and we suddenly had a leak in our ceiling coming into our bedroom, right above our bed.
I could see the clutter spilling out from every cupboard and corner. This house no longer felt like my home and every single thing that went wrong was another sign that validated my point — we had to buy another house.
I noticed that a lot of houses in our area were going up for sale, too. As I looked more into it, I found that the government had started up a new scheme to help home buyers by wiping out completely the stamp duty tax, potentially saving people tens of thousands of £s when purchasing a home.
Again, this was a huge sign to me — we were meant to move now. Suddenly, I was in a rush.
I’m telling you when your mind focuses on something, the universe works to attract it to you — good and bad. The Law of Attraction is no joke.
More kept on going wrong with our house and the stuff in it. Once, I picked up a glass and it just shattered to pieces, the glass specks splashing into my hair, my clothes, on my face. Cleaning that up with a 2-year-old around was NOT fun. Another time, a set of 3 frames I had stuck on the wall up the stairs all fell one after the other, denting the plasterboard wall on their way down.
The more you focus on something, the more it manifests. My hatred for this house became evident, it was as if it was haunted and trying to piss me off even more by breaking things in my face, literally.
The more I focused on moving, the less I liked our home, and the more kept going wrong with it.
6 months have gone by, and today, I absolutely friggin’ love my home — but we didn’t move.
Why?
I Changed My Perspective
I have always had a “deprived” mentality. The more I get, the more I chase. Likewise, as soon as I achieve a goal, I’m onto the next one.
I knew that buying a new home wasn't going to feed this appetite for long and I knew it was unfair of me to put so much pressure on the family to move.
I also knew that I had to take my own advice about happiness and how it has to come from within. I spotted lots of problems with this house, but the main problem was with me and the way I looked at it.
I needed to accept this home. No, I needed to love this home again, since we weren’t going to be moving out of it any time soon. And the best way to change your circumstances is by changing how you look at them.
I started to think back to when we first found it and remembered the reasons why we bought it.
No, this house isn’t perfect. But it is more than adequate. What’s more, it’s cheap to live in and it helps us be able to afford a hell of a lot — days out, restaurants, toddler classes, random Amazon purchases, etc. It’s in a really good family-friendly area just outside the main town, close to all the amenities but far enough away that it’s not busy with traffic and town noise.
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.” — Anonymous
The thing about gratitude is that when you start to deliberately focus on what you have and feel love for it, it spirals. Suddenly, you feel on top of the world with your life, despite nothing really changing other than your view of things.
I started appreciating the small things of our home that I liked.
The pictures around the house — many of them taken in this very home, of warm memories once lived. Our hotel bed. I remembered that many of the houses I viewed did not have a big master bedroom and I felt comforted by the fact that ours is super light and spacious.
Our kitchen, my favourite room of the house, because of its light and airy feel thanks to the large double French doors that lead to our small but pretty and private back yard.
This house has good things to it and I needed to focus on those to love it again.
My biggest problem with it was a lack of space and there being too much clutter. So my husband and I sat down and talked about what we could do to create more space. The first obvious option?
Marie Kondo The Sh*t Out Of It
The thing about space is that it doesn't really matter how much of it there is. You will naturally fill whatever you have of it if it’s in your nature to do so.
The same is said with our brains. When we think about little problems here and there, we magnify them. We make them bigger than they seem and we put them at the front of our minds. And when we’re used to doing this, we will only ever see problems.
I couldn’t see past the clutter in my house. But when the idea to declutter came up, I saw a slither of potential for space in this home, and hope for my happiness with it.
We started with the room I resented the most — our living room. We sold a bookshelf that took up a tonne of space and didn’t really serve a purpose. I rehomed, gave away, or chucked away what was in it.
There were a couple of smaller bits of furniture that didn’t need to be in the room, so they went. We got rid of our rug because it looked old and tatty, and I thought the clear floor would make the room look bigger — I was right.
We moved everything from inside the TV unit and replaced what was in there with our son’s toys which were originally in boxes on the floor. We also sorted through the outgrown baby toys and packed them away ready for when the baby arrives.
The transformation that our living room underwent by simply removing stuff is insane. People walk into our house and say it looks like we had the room extended.
Naturally, decluttering became a little addictive. We did the hallway next. Then, our garden sheds. We still have our bedrooms and offices to go through, and I cannot wait to do them.
The downstairs area feels like a whole new home. With less stuff, there is less to tidy up, clean, and organise. So it makes the job of maintenance much easier, as well as visibly giving me pleasure when I look at the clear spaces.
When I saw how much space we actually have and how much crap we hoarded — I let go of a big problem in my head that just didn’t need to be there.
How much do you zoom in on and make worse simply by thinking a little too much about them? How many problems are taking up the thinking space that you could simply let go of?
When I made space, I no longer felt that resentment for my own home. I felt relaxed. I felt grateful that one of my biggest problems evaporated just like that, and that it wasn’t that big of a problem to begin with.
Simply thinking objectively about the issues and being proactive is enough to sort them.
The answer seems obvious because it is, but when our negativity is present, we often miss the obvious.
Declutter your mind, zoom out a little on your issues and work on solving them one by one.
“Home is not a place…it’s a feeling.” — Cecelia Ahern
The Next Step: Be Smart About Your Storage
We’ve never had a proper shoe rack, and all our shoes have been scattered all over the place — stacked on top of made-up plastic shelves, on the floor in the cupboard under the stairs, and by the entrance to our home. Annoying AF.
I purchased the IKEA shoe racks. Simple, yet smart looking. I couldn’t believe I managed to fit 6 pairs of shoes in one. My husband’s 2 huge pairs of Timberland boots in another. Our entrance is clear, the shoes are on the wall, and our under-stairs storage now has space for other things, like bulkier toys, a stroller, etc.
The spare bedroom/office will be the baby’s bedroom. Thus, we will lose our guest bedroom. Now, this may sound spoiled because I know that it is not usually as important to have one. But we don’t have family in the same country as us. Nobody comes round just for dinner. They come to stay for weeks at a time — and we would never want them to have to stay at a hotel.
We need a spare bed for people to sleep in. So we will replace our amazing couch — for exactly the same one, but in sofabed mode, thus transforming the living room into a cosy, homey, private room in the evenings for our guests.
How many problems overlap in your mind? I feel like our shoes being dispersed all over the downstairs area of our house represented my inability to classify and separate my mind’s problems.
You link issues together and make a big deal out of small things. My dislike for the clutter combined with the idea of the loss of a guest bedroom had a hugely detrimental effect on my mental health because they represented deprivation rather than abundance.
Final Step: Let Abundance In
I hadn’t thought of any of these solutions before because I was too busy focusing on the lack of space in our home. I was consumed by the clutter. Now that we have less stuff, I feel we have more. More space, more practical storage solutions, and a more efficient system to keeping the house (and the mind) in order — filter what enters it!
My view on this home has done a 180 pivot, as has my mind. Yet, we didn’t undergo huge renovations or spend tonnes of money on an extension to the house. But I feel happy once again with my home and my circumstances.
I feel as if I have gained more. More love, more pleasure when I look at my home, and more clarity to my circumstances. I won’t say that we have taken a minimalist approach to life, by no means, but I feel I have learned a lot about how we look at our problems in life. I will certainly be adopting more of a minimalist view to everything because, quite often, our solutions are simple.
Takeaway
I compare the view of my home to my wellbeing because it is evidence that no matter what circumstances you’re in, you can still be unhappy, or happy.
All my physiological and psychological needs were met — I was safe, I wasn’t struggling financially, and my family and I are healthy. Yet, I still didn’t feel completely happy where we lived.
There are people who have much less than I do and feel abundance in their lives. It simply proves once again that it is us who choose to feel happy or not. We choose to see the good or the bad, and we choose how we feel about our lives.
Before jumping on to the next goal and chasing something you think will make you happy, look at the good side to your current circumstances first, and solutions will start flooding in.
Do some home decluttering, make some space for light, and feel the abundance bounce off the walls.
Sylvia Emokpae is passionate about self-love and motherhood. See more work like this.