This is my experience pursuing minimalism in which I defined 5 stages of Minimalism. Like so many people, I can easily push myself to accomplish a goal but struggle to make something a regular part of my life. In this post, I’d like to demonstrate how minimalism in daily life has changed over the past three years.
Back in 2019, I was really struggling. It was a combination of symptoms from a closed-head concussion brain injury and the mast cell disorder that reinflames scar tissue. Just as a quick example of what a brain injury might look like, I had received a letter in the mail about one month after the car accident from an organization that made it required that anyone who visited the hospital with a suspected concussion would be sent this letter explaining what brain injury is like.
I lived alone. I recall opening the letter and trying to read it. I couldn’t hold onto the words long enough to understand the meaning of the entire sentence and after a short period of rereading without understanding I set the letter in a pile of papers to “deal with later”. After four years of my neurologist insisting I should be evaluated for brain injury, I finally was and started to understand how my brain was overwhelmed much quicker by making decisions all day long. Decisions that used to be…well non-decisions. Your brain typically does an efficient job at grouping large amounts of information and throwing them out as irrelevant, but my damaged brain was trying to weigh irrelevant information as if it were necessary to make a decision.
So before, I could manage and quickly clean up all the things I owned that were all Tetris-ed into the closets and cabinets. My poor injured brain, however, couldn’t dismiss the relevance of everything in my sight when trying to do anything and I’d burn out very quickly. I wasn’t making it through the workday much less able to keep making decisions after.
The first stage of Minimalism:
A few months before I’d found minimalism, I’d been introduced to Dave Ramsey for budgeting purposes. My income had been unpredictable and my medical expenses were climbing. I discovered my rent was far too high for what I was actually bringing home for income and how much I was losing for medical expenses.
I started watching the housing market and going to open houses to get a feel for whether renting elsewhere or buying a home would be the best solution. My income was still lower so I knew I couldn’t actually afford as much of a home as I’d have expected to be able to at this point in my career, but I couldn’t handle the stress of a large mortgage. It would have undone everything I was trying to do.
What I found was that I would need to downsize from a 960 sqft apartment with an attached two-car garage to an 800 sqft home with a detached garage or an 800 sqft apartment with no garage and rent would keep going up.
From Money to Minimalism
Around this time, Marie Kondo’s show came out on Netflix and I started to see examples of people with rather similar looking houses and stress levels trying to reduce their items. A coworker that I shared my learnings with was the first to introduce me to the term Minimalism and I jumped onto this idea hard. It was what my brain needed!
I started about one month before I found my house and jumped into Marie Kondo’s method. It was eye-opening! I had 40 t-shirts that I got rid of and still had more than 20 remaining. Without doing the mass piles, I don’t think I would have recognized how illogical I was about clothing. However, I had to push the clothes off the bed because I didn’t have the decision-making capacity to finish this task in one day. I was smarter later on and sorted on the floor but that’s not great either.
I did a major purge of clothing over one weekend and it was a great way to start the journey. Then I believe it was Books, which wasn’t too difficult but also another weekend. Paper was the first major problem area. I had something like 8-10 stacks roughly 6 reams of paper tall each. This category was killer! Remember, I couldn’t really understand a sentence at this stage by the end of a workday.
Before I’d moved states when I knew I was changing jobs, I’d already culled tons of paper at that point and it was pretty smooth progress. After a brain injury, however, this was an insurmountable task. I was able to sub-categorize the paper stacks and then I tried to organize by date because I could manage to scan for a date and recognize a bank or utility statement without having to read anything. These are steps that really wouldn’t have been necessary with a healthy brain but I wasn’t trusting myself in this phase anymore.
Eventually, over the span of nearly two months, I was able to reduce several stacks of paper, shred them, and recycle them. I still moved loads of paper. I did embrace the ideal Marie Kondo sets out with Zero Paper as the goal. While in the US the legal system can lead you to think you need everything, it’s really not true. I had just concluded a lawsuit as well which allowed me to get the cathartic benefits of shredding such a stressful part of my life.
However, due to time constraints and brain power, I had to move off this category before getting very far in the process. I believe I reduced about 15% of the paper in that long and primarily weekend-focused activity. I might sort on a weekday but I did not have the energy for decisions.
Before moving, I was able to start “Komono” I believe she calls it. I only hit the kitchen area. I focused on this area because I now knew the house I was moving to and it had a tiny kitchen. I knew I could expand its storage a bit but I was stuffed to the brim in that kitchen with over twice the storage. Additionally, I tend to use the basic options for making foods over the specialty tools.
This was also another visual learning experience. I’d pulled everything that was in one cabinet out and it filled a 4’x8′ island! These were just storage containers!
Kitchen things were challenging because I’ve had to completely change what I eat due to the mast cell disorder and I hadn’t yet figured out what that looked like. Therefore I second-guessed every decision! It was frustrating. If I’d been cooking a regular menu this would have been as quick as clothing and really should have been by this point in my life.
On the plus side, I’d previously cooked at home regularly when I had just a mini-kitchen with no more than a cutting board-sized counter. It functioned well for me, so I knew I could do it.
However, I again didn’t have the stamina to get through it fast enough and eventually had to pump the breaks on my kitchen journey to start packing to move and sell things that I knew couldn’t fit in the new space.
The second stage of Minimalism:
After the move, I had assigned boxes to rooms and then wound up that I had to change which bedroom would actually be my bedroom. I didn’t measure my clearance for the boxspring to go downstairs. Oops! It’s not quite so simple but there wasn’t enough depth at the bottom of the stairs to get the box spring down. You live and learn, right?
The small bedroom downstairs became my miscellaneous box room. This included overflow kitchen items that I knew I didn’t need immediately and still needed to make decisions on and everything that I just didn’t have a plan for such as hobbies. The dedicated rooms were an Office, Guest bedroom, Master bedroom, and then the “box room” as I called it that would eventually be my music/exercise room.
Moves are stressful so again I was tackling these unpacking/decluttering on the weekends primarily.
This turned into rage purges on the weekends.
The third stage of Minimalism:
This made way to the third stage of minimalism when I finally realized that making large mounds of donation piles was leading to having to sort things again and that unfinished projects were getting lost all over the house. I was also remodeling the house during this time and was still not able to tackle kitchen items.
I created a station in the dining room with all in-process projects. I still had to pile donations on a wall and I began putting them out on the weekends for free and selling a few things in the local Buy, Sell, Trade group.
In the third stage, I really was doing a little every day and the biggest purges on the weekend. I might also spend a few days before the weekend to break down larger projects into achievable tasks for me. I also have physical limitations due to both the injury to my neck and the mast cell disorder so to finish these projects I had to make a plan with small steps and lots of breaks.
Fourth stage of Minimalism:
I hit this stage about 9 months after moving. In this stage, I actually made a home for things that I find to donate day-to-day. I also made homes for recycling containers and trashcans and where to stash gifts when I’m preparing for Christmas.
By this point, I generally did not have piles of donations outside the area defined unless it was simply too large for the shelf. I was not always getting dishes done but always did tidying before bed. If my health wasn’t good, I’d catch up on the first good day and I could recover more than a week of mess in about 15 – 30 minutes.
Deliberate decluttering was still done as projects but through the tidying routines, I’d move things I ran across that I no longer wanted or needed to replace due to wear and tear to the shelf right then.
I kept moving things through the few storage closets that I had to determine what things were important to have and where to have them. This is really because it was a new house with a completely different layout.
The fifth stage of Minimalism:
I no longer had “projects” in the sense of large areas that needed decluttering. Instead, my projects became simply doing quick look-throughs to take it further or remove the things that weren’t serving me. I might also do an organizing project where I buy something specific to solve a specific area or to replace my cardboard boxes with nice containers.
Tidying is done regularly and the biggest effort is made to finish projects timely and keep all flat surfaces clear. At this point, routines are settled and decluttering is mostly something that happens while using the areas.
This is when my interest in decorating pops up as well. It’s common that once you’re past the function aspect of your house, you also want to make it look nice. It’s easy to undo progress, so use caution here to return things that don’t work out right and use what you already have or discard what you already had if it’s not working.
Review:
I believe this is mostly what people refer to when they talk about “The Onion Method”. Even if you use another technique initially, it’s almost impossible to not want to go further later. Most people who start on this journey aren’t becoming extreme minimalists and don’t have much confidence in how far they can take it.
For example, I went back to decluttering paper more than five times. Partially because it’s dense with decisions but also, I really don’t know what I need. Same with the kitchen. Some areas might end up being easy to maintain but most will have an influx that requires tackling again.
If your life situation changes or your hobbies change, then you’ll have to go back to it as well.
