What do I want to keep?

Watching the YouTube video, “To Declutter Faster, Start with What You Need”, by Joshua Becker, completely changed the way I viewed decluttering.

A quick summary of this video is, when decluttering ask what do I need to keep, not what do I need to get rid of. The mental shift has been life-altering for me. I walk into the room, and ask myself what I want, not what I want to get rid of. 

What do I actually need? 

What do I actually use?

What do I actually like? 

I keep those items and then let go of what’s left.

I’ve been simplifying for about 7 years now. I’ve seen how reducing what I own has both helped me through and allowed me to thrive during difficult, rock bottom moments of my family’s life. Examples include navigating through a pandemic with young school-age children and helping my father through a devastating cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery process. By creating physical space in my home, by decluttering my stuff, I created mental and emotional space to take on these difficult situations.

I apply this “ what do I need to keep” technique to all areas of my life, not just material objects. People, time commitments, hobbies. I’ve minimized my stuff and moved on to those areas. I’m not just decluttering physical objects anymore. It’s so much bigger. Relationships, lifestyle choices, how I spend my time, patterns of thinking. I’m taking a good hard look at all of it and deciding what I want to keep and letting go of the rest.

I have become highly selective in how I invest my time and energy. Anything I have in my life that I only sort of enjoy is taking away from the things I actually love. It could be as superficial as, wearing clothing that is only okay, in contrast to the clothes that make me feel are phenomenal. Or as deep and important as spending time with people out of obligation, allows less time and energy to spend with the ones that light me up. The ones I actually want to be with and are genuinely important to me.

It took me 39 years to realize that if I walk away from a conversation with a person feeling drained and worse than when I started that conversation, consistently, I don’t need to be in that relationship. If it’s a co-worker or family member I may not be able to remove them from my life completely, but I can limit the interactions with them and the energy I invest to the best of my ability. That quote by The Minimalists, “you can’t change the people around you but you can change the people around you” fits well here.

I’ve found that once I got to a certain point in this “minimalism” thing, it’s like a big giant spotlight is being shone on all the things (not just material objects) that no longer belong there and that I don’t need to keep and it’s so easy to choose the ones I do.