Decluttering My Life

Originally the point of this piece of writing was to more directly address the issue of ‘clutter’ in our spaces, particularly our homes, and to highlight how this physical clutter might also clutter up our emotional space. Then once I started writing, I realised just how important this issue has been to me in my life, and so it’s largely ended up as yet another one of my memoirs!

I have a problem with ‘clutter’. My problem with clutter has got a lot better in recent months though.

At the end of last year, and for much of this January, I got rid of a large amount of my material possessions, put the rest into storage, then I packed my bags and got on a train to Brighton.

While I have significantly fewer things that I own, cluttering up my life, I still have a problem with clutter, ‘emotional clutter’. It may be partly that my mind is ‘wired’ in such a way that it just doesn’t filter out enough of the things I sense or think about. It may also be partly that I have a lot of trauma, and grief, and these things tend to throw stuff to the front of my mind. Instead of the past being the past, stored somewhere in rooms in the dark corridors of my mind, this stuff, the past, tends to be lying all around, getting in the way. I struggle to find the most important, meaningful things among it all.

Then there is the potential effect of my neuro divergence, specifically thinking about ADHD, which affects how I process information. This may have an impact on what feels like ‘clutter’.

This cluttering of my head has also got better though, I still have plenty of emotional clutter, but a big pile of it has now gone. The pile that was aware of the real, material clutter.

When I officially left my Mum’s council house 30 years ago, I had very few possessions. I think I had a small portable black & white television (which I later sold for £15 as I didn’t watch it any more), possibly a small word processor, my bass guitar, and a few clothes. I was ‘minimalist’ by virtue of my situation, but I also think I may be minimalist by nature too.

There were a few bits of furniture in my room, including a bed, a bit of cupboard space, and a desk. There was also a large storage heater, but I put it on its side, covered it with material and used it as a seat. For heating I started using the open fire. I went around the local area looking for scrap wood to burn, there were plenty of houses being renovated, scrap furniture, wooden pallets and so forth, so my heating was mostly free.

I became someone who looked in skips and in front gardens for “junk’’. I had a friend with a van who did this too, and so he’d pick things up and bring them to me. While looking for wood to burn, I found other things. My first sofa was just hanging around by a wall in the road, it was a 2 seater sofa, it looked okay, not really dirty, but had a rip at one side. We took it back to my room and it stopped being a neglected piece of junk furniture in the street, and something that I used and made me more comfortable. At one point I probably spent most of my time indoors on that sofa, and even slept on it from time-to-time. Later, when I had to move, I passed the sofa on to another friend, who continued to use it.

I had record players, cassette machines and other things which I repaired a bit and used to play my LPs and cassettes on (largely second hand ones too), which made my life much better.

One day my friend found some offices being gutted, outside was a skip full of old office ‘strip lighting’, which normally I hate. I took one of them, which had a very soft diffuser cover over it. I got some coloured lighting plastic sheets, which I placed inside the casing under the diffuser, then I propped the strip light up on its end, turned it on, and I had this glowing pedestal of colourful light, which people were normally amazed by, enjoyed, and commented on.

I used to leave my door open a lot, and people were invited to come in, use my space. They’d sit on the rubbish sofa, in front of the fire burning scrap wood, listening to second hand records and tapes on junk audio equipment, in the glow of my scrap office lighting. Sometimes we’d eat mushrooms we’d gathered from the forest, and dead animals that we’d picked up off the road on the way home.

Walking up my road one day I discovered a skip, and on top of all the scrap, was a computer, keyboard, mouse, and old CRT monitor. So I took it all home, wired it up and switched it on. It worked! Though I think the old monitor may have damaged my eyes. I bought some magazines which had ‘free’ CDs with software on them and installed it on the computer. One of the programs had some music software with it. At that point I began recording music on a PC, but then mixing it all down to a reasonably good second hand cassette recorder, rather than straight onto tape. This gave me a lot more freedom. Actually I didn’t have many microphones, and even tried to use a telephone receiver piece for one. My room had a lot of speakers in it, all wired up to a second hand amplifier. I placed 2 car stereo speakers behind my head on my sofa, and because all the speakers were mismatched, different frequencies came out of different parts of the room, which created a kind of pseudo surround sound effect.

I was poor, I was surrounded by other people’s scrap, unwanted, unused things, but I was resourceful, and turned every piece of junk into something useful, which made my life better in some way.

Times were exceptionally tough for me emotionally. Many really bad, some even traumatic things happened to me, which still cause me a lot of emotional distress now, but I think despite all of this, the way I lived my life, made things easier.

For many years this was how things stayed. I was known for my spaces being minimalist and resourceful, and I was somewhat proud of it. I think I was largely driven though, by a need to have few things, since I often moved from place-to-place.

In a way, I can feel ‘unsafe’ if I have lots of things that might need carrying around or looking after.

Part of the reason I started my solo project 7 years ago was so that I could travel on my own to a venue, perform to people, and rely on other people as little as possible. There is a lot more in that though, probably relating to my Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, which itself is probably based on lack of trust in both myself and others, and fear that if I let others do things for me, they might do something ‘wrong’ which could harm me (there’s a lot more to it than that). One effect of this ‘disorder’ though, is that I needed to reduce the number of hands needed to move things around. In order to do that, I needed to reduce the amount of stuff I needed to do the task in hand, play music. Normally with bands there would be a drum kit to provide drums, but I couldn’t carry a drum kit around with me. So instead I took a microphone and some bits of percussion to play. Normally I’d need some bass, and that would require a bass guitar, but I couldn’t carry a bass guitar around with me. I’d often use keyboard sounds, but most keyboards were too big to carry around. So I bought a small electronic organ, with little keys, but which had some very authentic organ sounds. To cover the bass, I linked the organ to a small analogue bass synth. I switched to Mandolin as my primary instrument, it’s small and can be carried in one hand easily. Most things I could pack into a large rucksack, strap that to my back, leaving 2 hands free to carry other things. For my first gig I needed to travel from Oxford to London, on the coach, then get from West London to South London, which I did partly by tube, and partly by bus. It wasn’t particularly physically easy, it wasn’t too bad though, but crucially I felt more independent.

Of course, when I got to play my performance, I didn’t have enough hands to play everything, so I’d packed a loop pedal to run instruments through, and layered my sound by playing one instrument, looping it, and playing another over the top. I did still have a load of effects pedals, but later, thanks to pretty recent advancements in modern technology, I bought myself a small tablet, an audio interface, and used software to emulate most of the effects (also amplifiers etc) and even do the looping.

At that point I had possibly the most compact set up possible, but was still able to make a big sound like a full band. I got to my shows, played well, was appreciated, and returned home. Importantly, I felt a ‘lightness’ in my head and felt rewarded for it too.

After my time living in shared housing, feeling relatively unsettled, and having few possessions, things started to change. I moved into a flat with my then partner, and I began to feel more settled. There was limited space in the flat though, particularly with two of us in it. I got a job and my income increased significantly. I was no longer poor. I grew my savings a bit. I started to buy more things, which took up more space. Throughout, I think I continued to have things that I used though.

After a few years of relative stability in our flat, probably the most significant change came. I got a better job that paid more money, and we moved to a house.

The house was pretty small, with two bedrooms, a largish living room, and dining area in the kitchen. It also, importantly here, had an attic.

For the first time in my life, I made a more dedicated studio space, which I also used as rehearsal space for several bands as well as my own work. I bought a drum kit (at first a cheap one, then I bought a good kit from the drummer of one of the bands I’d been in). That took up a load of space but was well used. I had a second hand 8 channel mixing desk, and had a series of better PCs for recording music on.

This nicely illustrates a problem. I could have just upgraded some of the components of my PC to newer ones. It’s relatively easy to swap out hard drives and memory, but as newer, better software came out, and as my requirements for making music grew, the motherboards became out-of-date. The processors were no longer good enough, and the memory wasn’t expandable any more. I’d have needed to replace the motherboards. Instead, I bought a new computer each time, and I had the attic space, so the old PCs went up in the attic, because it was relatively easy.

I started upgrading amplifiers and instruments. I got interested in playing some new instruments so I bought new instruments too.

I was still regularly drinking too much alcohol, partly as a means of avoiding the emotional pain I had underneath it all, which had been building up over the years, well, really since early childhood. I was socially anxious (I still am) about going into shops, so one day I got into online shopping, largely buying things on eBay.

I felt emotionally unstable, so I got drunk, and I went on eBay, and I started impulsively buying things. One day I saw someone’s post on Facebook, where they had bought a 1960s tape echo effects unit. I knew about them, loved the sound, and this thing looked cool, so I went straight over to eBay, searched for one, found a 1963 WEM Custom Copicat, and clicked “Buy It Now”. A few days later, it was there, sitting in my home studio. I had a lot of fun with it. Until later I stopped being bothered to replace the tape, and bought some decent effects pedals which though weren’t as cool, did the same job. So the tape echo box sat in the corner of the room.

Then some things started to break. It felt awful, I unscrewed the casings, and took things apart to try to fix them, couldn’t figure it out, got fatigued, felt terrible, and didn’t put things back together again in some cases. Then I couldn’t stand being reminded of the broken things, so they went up into the attic as well.

The attic started filling up, and I stopped putting things in it. Instead my more immediate space started to fill up with unused things, many broken. Actually some of the stuff didn’t go into the attic, simply because it looked aesthetically pleasing.

Why didn’t I just get rid of this stuff though?

Firstly, it seems I have some aversion to giving things away, or even more so, getting things repaired, and selling them. I think partly I felt ashamed of presenting myself and this broken stuff to others. I didn’t want people to know. Also I just didn’t want to think about it at all, it caused me anxiety to even think about the stuff I’d accumulated which I no longer used, so I just avoided dealing with it. The more ‘junk’ I accumulated, the worse I felt, the more I avoided it all. My Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder and not trusting anyone to do things for me too, just in case they ‘messed up’ and hurt me, also got in the way. I wanted to do things for myself, but actually didn’t have the skills, motivation or time, so I didn’t sort it all out either. It just sat there, often in pieces in the corner of the room.

Some things, I simply told myself might come in handy one day, but it was a day that never came. I could have got rid of that stuff, and then bought, even second hand, or borrowed if the day came that I might need it, but I hung on to it.

Having things in the attic didn’t completely help my situation either. Though I didn’t see all that stuff on a day-to-day basis, I knew it was there, and one day I might have to deal with it, or I might ‘need’ it.

Then my relationship broke up. My now ex partner moved out, and I was left on my own, with increasingly poor mental health, in a house that we’d lived in for years, surrounded by memories of better times, and surrounded by once loved, broken, neglected things.

Those things became a metaphor for my life, and myself. Even worse, I became conscious that not only were these things cluttering up my physical space, but they were always cluttering up my emotional space.

In the last 4 years of living in that house, I felt the ‘weight’ of all those broken, neglected things, in my heart and in my head.

I set about trying to do something about it, but instead of getting rid of things, I just moved things around. I tried to hide broken things among everything else, at least if I could see things, it’d look tidy. This worked a little, but not enough.

Then one day, I decided to get as much of the broken, unwanted items, and stack them up in the kitchen dining area. My thinking was that I’d make myself see it all everyday, I’d feel awful about it, and I’d be prompted to start dealing with it. This didn’t work. I went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, I saw the piles of things, I felt emotionally sick about it, and it even stopped me wanting to go into the kitchen.

My situation got a lot worse. There was a global pandemic and ‘lock down’. I was on my own, trying to work from home, struggling with serious loneliness, and grief, still surrounded by broken symbols of my past life.

It got to the stage that I avoided going to bed, I felt I needed to be sitting at my computer to distract myself from the emotional pain I was feeling, and going to bed meant I’d no longer have any distraction and start to feel that pain. I was trying to work through a pandemic, on my own, not going out of the house for months on end. Sometimes I went out of the house to put the household rubbish out, however, even that started building up inside the house. The conservatory was taken over by piles of cardboard which should have gone in the recycling. I had a drawer full of carrier bags that I’d never fully get through, even with using some as bin liners.

I had bags full of screws and other small bits of things, in no particular order, and much of it I kept just in case some of it could be used to repair broken stuff that I wasn’t ever likely to repair.

There were big holes in the ceiling which instead of getting repaired, I covered up with material. All the windows in the house failed, they were letting in noise from the road, and cold air, so I sealed them up with tape. I couldn’t even see out of the windows properly anymore, so I bought some lead strips and made fake ‘lead lights’ to at least make the windows look aesthetically pleasing.

I had an obsession with buying first Indian mandala wall hangings, then black sheets, and metres of purple velvet. I had excess, I ran out of things to do with it all, and ended up covering all the walls with it, which was actually really nice. The plaster and damp course for the house failed, the walls were wet, the fabric absorbed moisture, and the house and air filled up with mould which later damaged my lungs to the point I was waking up unable to breathe.

I struggled through the pandemic, getting worse. My elderly cat became very frail, I was stuck in the house with him, and couldn’t really look after myself, let alone my cat who started going to the toilet everywhere then collapsed and died. Thousands of people were dying and I feared going out partly due to that (and it worked in that I was probably one of the safest people around from Covid).

I struggled with a couple of intense, unstable relationships in which I could rarely spend time with people I was feeling closer to or wanted to be closer to. I had severe grief still over the loss of my 22 year long relationship. I came out as transgender. My employer made thousands of redundancies and permanently shut its offices, I survived redundancy but lost my team, moved jobs in a rush and struggled to find my feet in the new one (I cried on camera in front of my new manager during practically every meeting including our very first).

My mum was discovered to be terminally ill with cancer and then she passed away. I woke up in the middle of the night, in the dark, on my own, in a state of severe anxiety, to the point of extreme panic but I couldn’t go anywhere, I couldn’t escape, I felt smothered by darkness, and consumed by the darkness within me.

During all of this, the presence of those unused, broken, neglected things, started to weigh heavier on my soul. They were in a way, part of the darkness.

When I eventually went to bed, I lay down on my pillow, too anxious to cry myself to sleep much of the time. Images of past trauma threw themselves in my head, tainted memories of people I had loved, tormented me. I felt terminally lonely.

I had to stop working because I was so ill. I lost any routine I had. I struggled to go to sleep, then to get out of bed. I spent most of my time either in bed, but not sleeping, or at my computer. I had no social life anymore, there was no home studio setup anymore, there were no bands to record (and I’d failed to finish previous recordings we’d made, which also acted like those neglected possessions). The good work that I and others had put in, became part of the clutter, cluttering up the hard drive of my studio PC, cluttering up my head, and damaging my relationships.

It was like I couldn’t contain all the trauma, the loneliness, the grief, and my clutter caused avalanches to spill out in the ‘real world’. It felt almost impossible to write a few words to people I cared about, instead, great floods of misery and emotion came pouring out like a huge burst dam, consuming the villages of loved ones below. For some people, this was too much, or equated to me being ‘too much’, and they started to push me away. People often have their own ‘clutter’ to deal with, without having mine come down on them. But then, the effect of these damaged relationships, also formed part of this chaos, and I felt ‘unseen’ and ‘unheard’, even more trapped under my clutter and trauma, feeling increasingly lonely, and powerless.

The time came when I was faced with having to leave the house for good.

I had actually wanted to get to that point 4 years earlier. My plan had been to get back to work after intensive therapy, get reasonably stable, and at the time I felt like I might be able to manage it. Then the universe, events beyond my control, toppled my tower of trauma and rubbish, burying me under it. I couldn’t feasibly leave the house during a pandemic anyway, particularly when I had nowhere else to go.

On advice from others, and from myself, I tried to feel excited about the impending change, but all I felt was terror and panic.

By that time, I not only had no job and no routine, but I had no income, I’d lost all the most stable, safe relationships I’d had. My ex tried very hard to help, but she couldn’t really do much, and it was problematic for me to start engaging with her more due to my grief.

All the clutter in the attic, that had literally been over my head all that time, was then uncovered.

We realised that of course in order for me to move out I’d need to declutter the space. That meant ideally I needed to both get rid of much of the clutter, and to have a relatively empty house. In order to get rid of the clutter in the attic, I needed to go into the attic, and get it all out. Ideally I wanted to get things out one-by-one, and get rid of things, have it taken for scrap, or given away, or sold. Instead, I agreed to start just getting it out and piling it up in the rest of the house. It was a physically exhausting job, there was only a ladder and a hatch, and I’d just randomly shoved everything into the space, I wasn’t even sure what was up there. I did a lot, handing or even throwing things down the hatch, but I was also under serious physical fatigue and so couldn’t complete it all in one go. Eventually though, most of the stuff came out of the attic, and then it was piled up in the spare room, the living room, and the kitchen, making the place less appealing to buyers, even making it difficult to get into the room.

I made myself an island of safety among all of this. I gathered as many things as possible into one room, my bedroom, things that were either necessary and functional, like my PC and monitor, but also things that brought me some happiness. Some things had no function but I felt good having them around me, like nice ornaments, trinket boxes and so forth. I had my nice ornate full length mirror, the purple velvet, garlands of fabric flowers and plastic ivy, fairy lights, and importantly, my musical instruments.

Something magical happened here. My room became an extension of me, my self expression, or how I really wanted to be, the future. Outside the room, was a complete mess which represented my past, broken, unwanted, unloved, neglected. I felt the contrast between these aspects of me very strongly.

The adverse effect of this possibly though, was that as long as I stayed in my room, I could ignore the other stuff more, well, so I thought. I knew I would need to get rid of most of it, some of it I was resigned to the idea of putting into storage, but the more of I held on to, the more it would cost (keeping in mind my lack of income and that my living costs were due to go up drastically both due to the change in my circumstances, and all this being at a time of sudden increase in cost of living for everyone). I could have incurred the extra cost and put it all in storage, but I knew that even if this clutter was in storage, completely out of sight, I’d still know of its existence, I’d still know it was broken, neglected, unloved, and it would still weigh heavily on me.

The loss of my home was impending. Essentially I felt I lost my home, before I even left it. I had strangers coming round to the house to view it, my being trans and my gender dysphoria made things difficult as few people understand what it’s like to be trans and queer, they wouldn’t ‘get me’ or really ‘see me’, they might misgender me (and I had to continue to use my deadname officially). I had strangers coming round who might not even agree with my existence as a trans woman, or a woman even. I had to let people into my home, even into my safest space, my room, who I really didn’t want in there. Some people came round uninvited and unannounced, which made me feel extremely unsafe in my own home. I had past trauma about people seriously physically hurting me in my safest space too, so I had flashbacks of that trauma also making me feel very afraid. I had estate agents, buyers outside my room, which I’d effectively retreated to, discussing my home as if it was theirs. One day, I heard them talking on the other side of the door to my room, the buyers asked to see inside my room (they had already done so and really had no need to do it again, I’d finally put my foot down and tried to protect my boundaries, which I think also made me look like I was being unnecessarily awkward), the request was denied and a voice explained “it’s full of stuff”.

I had also been reduced to ‘stuff’. It felt as if I had become part of the clutter. I was too much, and getting in the way.

Though I didn’t feel listened to here either, since when I’d communicated my boundaries, I’d said to be honest about the situation, and just tell people that I didn’t want to see anyone, that I needed some privacy. I avoided communicating my boundaries with the estate agent and buyers directly though, because I was scared, and I just wanted someone to help me.

I knew it would have been better to make a start on getting rid of the clutter as soon as I could, but I didn’t feel like I had the emotional or physical capacity to deal with my needs, let alone the house full of clutter. My head was too cluttered and I didn’t have the energy. Instead, I made a conscious decision to not deal with it, which caused me internal conflict. I essentially just tried to give up and go with the flow, hoping that things would just work out fine, telling myself to let go and stop worrying about the future so much. I was advised by others to do this. “Just take small steps” they said. Except I was someone who was hypervigilant, with trauma, and mental health problems which meant I was constantly planning way ahead into the future, because I felt if I didn’t, things would go very wrong and I’d get hurt. To be quite frank, generally speaking, I have also been right about this as well. But, at that point, really the choice was between pushing myself to do things I felt I couldn’t handle, and trying to not worry about the future so much, with the clock ticking.

I choose to not push myself, to not do much. I tried to do some things, to pace myself, but every day was such an immense struggle.

Really what I was doing was forcing myself into the ‘end game’. A place where I’d have so little time to get rid of the clutter, that either I’d have to panic and deal with it all very quickly, or I’d totally break down and someone else would have to deal with it (possibly I’d be in a secure unit and physically unable to do anything, which I didn’t want either).

To make things worse, things stalled a bit. This happened a couple of times, communication was poor, and I felt dependent on someone else’s life and risks as a result. So things dragged on for months longer than they could have, which on the one hand was something of a relief as I had more time, and on the other gave me an opportunity to be sitting around with my problems and clutter for even longer, not doing enough. I felt utterly miserable and hated myself for not feeling able to deal with it all.

Then finally, the future was sealed. Losing my home became clearly inevitable, as did my need to deal with all the clutter.

The inevitable panic stations situation I had in part engineered happened. It was a very tough time and I had about 2 months, including over Christmas and New Year, to do it all in. It was possibly the worst Christmas I’d ever had.

I had many possessions that really were worth a fair amount of money, and I needed all the money I could get, but selling things would take a lot longer than scrapping things or giving them away. I had things that could be sold easier if I had them repaired, but I didn’t have time to get them repaired and then sold.

I set about pulling things out of the piles of clutter, giving them a clean up, then taking photographs of them. I managed to sell a few things that I really wasn’t going to give away, they were too expensive, including my lovely drum kit, and guitar amp. Some stuff was put rather hastily into piles, and taken away as ‘scrap’. I fear I might even have accidentally got rid of important things to me, but once it was gone it was too late and there was no record of it. The rest of the stuff, I started putting on a website for getting rid of things for free, and here’s where I had my most success. I had at one point, several advertisements up at once, mostly for some really decent, working or repairable music equipment, for free. As a result I then had a lot of interest of course, and I had a calendar full of people coming round to collect stuff. More strangers in the place I once called home taking away bits of my past, which I was somewhat ashamed about, having people see how I had neglected these things, but then they were getting things for free. Some people were absolute fuckabouts who didn’t turn up. I started getting annoyed and angry, which in a way helped me focus and just want to get on and get rid.

The best thing that happened here though, was that though I felt sadness over this stuff being taken away, I also felt great relief. Each item that was physically taken away, never to be seen again by me, felt like a piece of emotional clutter also being taken away. Momentum built up, and at one point I think I started getting a rush out of it, looking forward to the day that piece of clutter left my life. Also importantly, I felt like I was doing the right thing, despite not getting any money out of doing it. There was a man who took my lovely Hammond style organ away, it was for his teenage daughter to learn to play on. It felt really good to be giving away my things to people who might find some joy out of this stuff, rather than it sitting around making me feel miserable. I kind of felt a bit religious about it, doing good deeds for people. I saw genuine smiles on some people’s faces, and so they should be, getting perfectly reasonable, good quality, often vintage music equipment for nothing.

I was still seriously struggling, and I knew I’d still end up with a lot of possessions in storage, but there would be far less things in storage that were total clutter, I’d need less storage space, I’d spend less money, I’d have fewer things cluttering up my head, and that felt good.

My clearing out spree ended only a few weeks before I was due to leave my home for good. I still had a lot of things left to store, but I drew a line under it. The next task was to start getting things out of the house and storage. Thankfully my ex really helped by letting me use some of the space in the house she was living in, which helped me reduce the amount of storage I’d need to pay for by about half. Though this remains a worry for me, as it can’t stay there forever, I’m still in effect homeless (though No Fixed Abode rather than sleeping rough), so I’ve nowhere to put anything, and it also in a way reduces my independence, and keeps me tied to the past.

I didn’t manage to complete all my tasks. The final days of being in that house came. I got most of my possessions, things that I would like to keep, together and packed in crates. I booked my storage space, did my inventory, and paid people to come and pick most of it up, then helped take it to the storage facility and get it neatly stacked up and locked away. This was also a massive weight off my mind.

I had to focus on leaving. I was leaving my home with no new home to go to. It had been the longest time I’d lived anywhere in my life, 15 years of it. I was leaving the city I’d lived in for 40 years, to go to a new city. What little capacity I had (well I felt I had none, I just had to stop trying to spin so many plates and let them drop to the floor), needed to go on getting myself through the start of a new journey. There was still stuff in the attic that I felt bad about, and some stuff still in the house. My once lovely looking cosy safe space had been stripped bare, revealing peeling wallpaper and soaking wet walls, and a mess.

Also in the final few days before leaving my home, I dealt with some small but very significant ‘clutter’. I had piles of school reports and some photographs of my past life, plus a load of instruction manuals, official paperwork and other items, which I’d hoarded for sentimental reasons, or no good reason at all, and which were of no significance now to anyone other than me. I made one final fire in my fire pit in my garden, used scrap bits of paper and cardboard that were still hanging around, as tinder, and some scrap bits of wood from the garden on top, plus a chair that was once well loved but broken. I put the bass guitar which was broken and hadn’t been used in years and I didn’t want anyone else to have, and that was one of the few possessions I had when I had moved into my first room on my own 30 years earlier, and I set fire to it all. I then took the school reports, and some photographs, and had a ritual of burning them, one-by-one. It was all clutter really, I had the memories, I didn’t need the bits of paper, or want to be carrying them around with me, I wanted to let go of it all. So I let it burn. Gone for good, as flames and sparks into the cold, night sky.

On the day before leaving I got very anxious and annoyed, as I was trying to pack ready for my journey, and a new life, but the place was still in a mess and I was getting overloaded with questions about what to do with this thing or that thing, and I snapped a bit. I was even asked if I could delay going to Brighton, but I’d paid a lot of money and had everything planned out and it would have thrown me off balance even more. We agreed that I couldn’t deal with what was left, and so others would have to go up into the attic, deal with what was left, take stuff away for free if they could use it, or scrap stuff, or have it stored elsewhere. I did my best really, I had no more to give, I needed to focus on now and the immediate future, not the things of the past, or other people’s needs, however much I cared, I had to care about myself first, to get myself through the coming days as safely as possible.

The final day came, there were still some fraught interactions due to the dual task of me needing to leave and things in the house needing to be dealt with but I made good as best as I could. Perhaps the final act of leaving that house, and letting go of those possessions should have felt more powerful and symbolic than it did at the time, but instead I was just focused on what I needed to do in the present.

And so, on that day, I gathered up the small amount of my possessions that I felt I needed (well, I took too many items of clothing though really, which now literally weigh me down), and my mandolin, I closed the door of the house I once called home, got in a taxi, then a coach, then on a train, on my own, feeling lighter, scared, but focused and somewhat relieved, and headed for the city I now call home, or perhaps a home from home, since I don’t have an actual home for myself anymore. It seems the remainder of my possessions, some of it ‘clutter’ have a more stable roof over them than I do.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve struggled, partly due to my low capacity and high levels of anxiety, to find a new home, and I think now the chances of finding a new home that I can fill with the rest of my stuff with are very low. Now I am trying to come around to the idea that I still have too much clutter, albeit out of sight and in another part of the country, and that I may need to let go of more of it in the coming months. As I continue on this new part of my journey through life, these things are becoming somewhat less important to me though, which is both sad but also something of a relief. I can always start again and in the meantime I am back in place where I simply cannot accumulate any more clutter, at least of the physical sort. I don’t even have space for another pair of shoes right now. These boots will have to wear out, I’ll have to throw them away probably, and buy new ones (I have been offered a pair of boots but not only do I not have space for them, I am not sure about literally walking in someone else’s shoes).

Perhaps I could have done things differently in relation to the hoarding of material possessions that end up cluttering up both my physical and emotional space, but I can’t change the past. It’s not necessarily that I did anything wrong, I didn’t know better. I do now though, so I can take all of this as a lesson. Or maybe if someone else reads this, it’ll help them make a decision.

We may feel restricted by our capacity to physically or emotionally deal with ‘clutter’. We may feel like hoarding material possessions because one day they might be useful, but the choice is probably this: We can either hang on to those things and risk them cluttering up both that physical and emotional space indefinitely, adding to our emotional pain, hindering our ability to heal from our wounds, until an inevitable, stressful panic ensues anyway, or not.

There is another choice though, and that is to simply not collect clutter in the first place. Some ‘clutter’ in life we may feel we have no choice but to collect, shit happens. Often though, we collect things, they may bring us joy, but then this ends, the relationship between us and that thing ends, but we may continue to try to hang on to what is really a shell of the past, as if we’re holding on to the past itself. This is probably not wise. It’s like filling our pockets with heavy rocks and stones, then plunging into the beautiful river of the present, or the future and trying to swim with it all holding us down. We have the memories and the experiences though, we don’t need the pockets full of rocks and stones. Cast them off before jumping into the water.

Maybe even cast a few things into the water, things that won’t pollute the river, but will sink to the bottom and become part of the river of life.

And in a way, we should be jumping into that water and going for a swim every hour of every day perhaps.

We can always leave a few things on the riverbank of course, but perhaps these are small things that remind us of a few good lessons.

Sometimes we simply collect things because they have been discarded, and if we have nothing, and can make good use of these things, then great. If they stop being of use, or break, then maybe try not to do what I did and shove them in the attic, or in the corner of the room. Just because they are out of sight, doesn’t mean they are out of mind. Nor will they magically get fixed by sitting around the place.

On a practical level, it can be great to ‘rescue’ things from the street and give them a home, but merely picking something up then filling up all the spaces in your home, in case this stuff might one day be useful, is probably not the best of ideas. Maybe one day it will be useful, but maybe that day never comes, in the meantime, it’s probably a trip hazard, or there’s so many plastic bags, boxes full of who knows what, bicycles, parts, and stuff, that you can’t find your favourite mug to make yourself a nice cup of tea in, or anything else of any worth among it all. Maybe you intend to pass the thing you’ve rescued from the street on to someone else to make good use of. If your home is full of this stuff, then that suggests there is a problem. Perhaps the home of a person who lives like this should not have any of this stuff lying around in. If there is a good, healthy flow of things, there should be no clutter. You pick that thing up off the street, you give it away, or you fix it and make it useful, or you don’t pick it up in the first place, leave it to someone else. How many plastic bags, cardboard boxes, or even unread books do you actually need?

Our homes are our safe spaces, these are spaces for us. There may appear to be just enough space for us physically in these places, but the physical spaces can also translate to emotional space. If we fill up every available space for things that don’t currently really bring us any good emotional value, even practical things that make our lives easier, then we may also be filling up our emotional space with these things, and we will have less space for us to just be.

Maybe there are no truly empty spaces at all. Maybe just because there’s a piece of floor, or wall, it doesn’t mean it has to be filled by any physical object. The same goes for the space within us. The space within us, is really important, it’s where we exist, our true selves. It may be a void, but our void is important. Good things can come out of the void, out of the uncluttered space, or good things that we create can fill the void, instead of just a load of junk that serves us no real purpose.

Fill the space with beautiful things, or enjoy the beautiful space.

Copyright © 2026 Siobhán Sarelle