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lotesse... it's not like I'm the princess of cleanliness. But I'm big on space aesthetics, and people tell me my rooms are always very good. At this point, I've also gotten very good at living functionally and aesthetically in small spaces with low budgets. So this is all very much stuff I think about.
It's also in my mind of late because I've been dealing more with other family cultures around stuff. Aesthetically, I'm very in line with my parents, and extended family - we're all semi-broke aesthetes with attractions to art objects, books, visual simplicity, and nature motifs, so there's a lot of overlap in what we consider treasures.
It was notable when I was collecting my things after the divorce; my things are all paintings and books and objet d'art, mostly with personal associations rather than monetary value. Even my kitchen and sewing things are attractive, antique or handmade, and personal heirlooms or thrift-store finds. None of it is the newest or the most shiny, or the most perfect, but it all works for me, and every blessed thing in my pack sparks joy. I've moved more than a dozen times in my adult life, so it's been pared down over and over again. The thrift store giveth and the thrift store taketh away, blessed be the name of the thrift store.
Last year, I was dragging more and more of D's things every month. He'd moved a lot as an adult, too, but every time had apparently shoved all his shit in boxes and sent it home to be stored. When he started living with me, he told me about the situation: he had two vans full of random stuff parked on family property, and a bunch of things from his father, and needed somewhere to put them. After we were married, we got a place together, and his stuff started coming back in carloads every week. I assumed he was going to sort and get rid of it; instead, it piled up in the rental's second bedroom, increasingly rendering it unusable. After a few months, he stopped unloading it out of the car; I'd do it eventually, when I became frustrated by the lack of cargo space. It was starting to really get to me -- and it was a huge part of what was so critically ailing him. It had gotten too big to handle, and metasasized on him, but he couldn't pull the plug and just bin it all. Every day he had off, he'd start by saying he'd deal with it, and the prospect was so psychologically daunting and unpleasant that he'd spend the afternoon depression-napping on the couch instead.
I get that "sparks joy" can sound like a silly rubric, but -- what if you think about the other sorts of feelings that things can spark? When you're towing stuff around because you feel obligated to a past version of yourself to keep the trappings of a dream you've in reality long since abandoned; or when you're trapped in the panics of the past and can't relax into the safety of the present. Some things spark sorrow, or shame, or regret -- and it is a great good thing of the world that you can just get rid of them. Clothes that fit some idealized version of your body? Agh. Books you feel you should have liked, or should have read? Fuck that. Carrying those things with you is an unnecessary and unpleasant labor, and it's a good thing to put down and be free of.
(Personally, I don't think it's healthy to carry grief or memory too close; I think letting go of the lost is needed for continued growth; but I understand that one more, and am not likely to interfere in persons' handling of it. Still, my father's example teaches me to be glad that it was my aunt who took all my grandmother's things, because she's saddled herself with ghosts and he is free to fly, and to remember more authentically and less painfully.)
It's also in my mind of late because I've been dealing more with other family cultures around stuff. Aesthetically, I'm very in line with my parents, and extended family - we're all semi-broke aesthetes with attractions to art objects, books, visual simplicity, and nature motifs, so there's a lot of overlap in what we consider treasures.
It was notable when I was collecting my things after the divorce; my things are all paintings and books and objet d'art, mostly with personal associations rather than monetary value. Even my kitchen and sewing things are attractive, antique or handmade, and personal heirlooms or thrift-store finds. None of it is the newest or the most shiny, or the most perfect, but it all works for me, and every blessed thing in my pack sparks joy. I've moved more than a dozen times in my adult life, so it's been pared down over and over again. The thrift store giveth and the thrift store taketh away, blessed be the name of the thrift store.
Last year, I was dragging more and more of D's things every month. He'd moved a lot as an adult, too, but every time had apparently shoved all his shit in boxes and sent it home to be stored. When he started living with me, he told me about the situation: he had two vans full of random stuff parked on family property, and a bunch of things from his father, and needed somewhere to put them. After we were married, we got a place together, and his stuff started coming back in carloads every week. I assumed he was going to sort and get rid of it; instead, it piled up in the rental's second bedroom, increasingly rendering it unusable. After a few months, he stopped unloading it out of the car; I'd do it eventually, when I became frustrated by the lack of cargo space. It was starting to really get to me -- and it was a huge part of what was so critically ailing him. It had gotten too big to handle, and metasasized on him, but he couldn't pull the plug and just bin it all. Every day he had off, he'd start by saying he'd deal with it, and the prospect was so psychologically daunting and unpleasant that he'd spend the afternoon depression-napping on the couch instead.
I get that "sparks joy" can sound like a silly rubric, but -- what if you think about the other sorts of feelings that things can spark? When you're towing stuff around because you feel obligated to a past version of yourself to keep the trappings of a dream you've in reality long since abandoned; or when you're trapped in the panics of the past and can't relax into the safety of the present. Some things spark sorrow, or shame, or regret -- and it is a great good thing of the world that you can just get rid of them. Clothes that fit some idealized version of your body? Agh. Books you feel you should have liked, or should have read? Fuck that. Carrying those things with you is an unnecessary and unpleasant labor, and it's a good thing to put down and be free of.
(Personally, I don't think it's healthy to carry grief or memory too close; I think letting go of the lost is needed for continued growth; but I understand that one more, and am not likely to interfere in persons' handling of it. Still, my father's example teaches me to be glad that it was my aunt who took all my grandmother's things, because she's saddled herself with ghosts and he is free to fly, and to remember more authentically and less painfully.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-16 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 12:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-18 09:59 am (UTC)That is such a great way to put it.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-23 04:41 am (UTC)