sorting self
April 1, 2015 § 4 Comments
I am minimalist in my preferences with little need for material keepsakes or decorations. Clutter in the context of home carries a burden of distraction that suffocates my serenity. It is a comfort I grew to recognize as I stumbled through absent-minded gestures of nesting in the earliest days of marriage and motherhood; a trial and error of expression first based in assumptions of expectation and later honed to a more sophisticated sense of self.
My initial efforts at creating a home were centered in hand me down necessities and frivolous decorations; inexpensive trinkets and dated discards that anchored our home in a mismatched hodgepodge of others’ generosity and my well-intentioned eagerness to fill nooks with expressions of the Us we were ever evolving into. Our first home was a time capsule of nervous uncertainty; each choice made with desperate hopefulness for traditions newly formed and fears poorly hidden.
It was only in moving, discarding everything for something unknown, that I grew into my preferences. This awakening was slow then sudden; it began as we prioritized what we no longer wanted against what we could not bear to leave behind. Somewhere in the interim between leaving our first home and living through the construction chaos of our second home, we learned to live with less and became more intentional about items that brought us joy and purpose; individually and collectively.
The more complicated pieces of home, the most colorful and uncoordinated accessories were never the discarded relics of outgrown phases of interest, but rather the less functional evidence of uncertainty as each of us grow into new curiosities. Those items we purchase or keep to moor ourselves to something intangible, they are the objects that clutter our spaces with divided sincerity that pulls at our attention with remorse or resistance.
It is a lesson I have yet to master as I look past the distraction of my children’s untidy spaces to the more recklessly procrastinated and deceptively attended uncertainty of long overlooked corners of self.
scribblechic 
I feel like, as fast as I shed things, people send me new things. And find myself resenting them. Aargh. I get it.
A few years back I actually asked family and friends to forgo exchanging gifts. It felt like an unnecessary extravagance for my personality and I was happily surprised by others’ relief. Now, instead of the squandering time searching for the perfect gift, we preserve a stolen moment to share a meal or connect over coffee.
And, of course that sense of self is never solid; always flowing, changing…
So true. The work of self is ever unfinished.