My Year of Minimalism
Medium will be my accountability partner.
I’m embarking on a year of practicing the art of minimalism with intention.
Just to see what happens.
After all, I am a minimalist at heart.
I’m not sure if I was born with this temperament of wanting to keep it simple. More likely, this way of life was picked up and learned from my type-A personality father, and it stuck with me in most areas of my life, but not all.
It began watching my Mom and Dad and their relationship with “things.” My father rarely bought anything. But when he did, it was of the highest quality, and he took great care and pride in his nice things. My Mom was more of a hoarder; a hoarder of mostly the sentimental.
For a house full of five children and two adults, it was reasonably clutter-free except for our garage and attic where my Mom stored her sentimental belongings. Those boxed treasures she kept, passed down from her parents, that she couldn’t bear to part with because they were the only things that remained of her parent’s existence, except for my Mom’s memories.
I like organization. Ok. I love it. I really do.
I’ve been this way since I can remember.
I was downright Monica-Geller-like-annoying growing up. While my friends were at the movies or the mall or the roller rink in sixth grade, I was at home organizing my CD collection in alphabetical order, after order by genre, of course. And it was fun!
As my compulsion for order grew, I quickly realized I could reduce my control-freak tendencies by simply having less stuff to control, therefore limiting my time spent organizing. I’m pretty sure my desire to keep order in my small room, that was all mine and mine alone, was in direct proportion to the chaos I was experiencing within my family structure.
I couldn’t control the unpredictability of my father’s moods when he walked through the door at the end of his long workday, but I could control my little room upstairs, which I made my whole world.
And so, a minimalist was born at a tender age out of a need to assert some control over her world.
What minimalism means to me
Minimalism is merely clearing your life of anything that is weighing you down, anything that is not serving your goals. It can be applied to all areas of your life where you want to find success: writing, health, finances, retirement, relationships, your home life, and so on. Anything you deem essential and of value to you.
It is a lifestyle that allows you to figure out what your essentials are, what things in your life do you value the most, and what, in life, is getting in the way of those values.
What is cluttering up the path and acting as an obstacle to you realizing your goals; what you have identified as your values. Once you recognize what your core values are, then you can quickly identify what is taking up space and stopping you from making room for those essential values to grow.
A simple example of this is:
What do I want: I want to write and post on Medium.
What is getting in the way of finding time to write: social media and other noise.
Solution: Make an agreement with yourself to say no social media until writing happens.
Ahhhh, clutter-free. Minimalism.
This is not everything I have cleared from my life to make room for writing. I’m just simplifying for effect.
You can apply minimalism to any area of your life.
Since I have ceased checking Facebook regularly, I have written every day and have published on Medium once a day for 14 days consecutively, making it almost halfway to meeting my 30-day challenge of posting once a day on Medium.
I firmly believe I can succeed and finish the next 16 days of my goal of publishing on Medium once a day until the 30 days is complete.
By actualizing this goal of writing and sharing my work — an essential value that I have identified as being relevant to me — I have added value to my life.
It feels good to realize a goal, even a small one like writing every day and sharing your work, upping the value to my life.
During these last two weeks, I have logged onto Facebook for a total of maybe 20 minutes. And guess what, I have not missed anything important on Facebook, nothing essential to me, or to me achieving my goals, is happening on Facebook.
This morning it didn’t even occur to me to look at the Facebook icon on my iPhone for notifications. Breakthrough.
Using the art of minimalism, I eliminated one clutter filled area in my life that was not serving me, it was only getting in the way of my writing.
Minimalism.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering Type A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
