I tried (and failed) to declutter my life in 31 days.

 So I thought Decluttering would be fairly easy to do when spread out over a month. Clearly, I was wrong. I thought the struggle would be that December is the month of Christmas, my birthday, and gift giving. While that is partly to blame for the current state of affairs in my room, it is also not the full story. But first let's go over what I initially thought would happen...

On November 30th, I brought out the camera to announce my plan of action. I honestly thought this would be a pretty chill video. Here is essentially what I said:

That I know it will be kinda difficult but I wanted to take on the challenge of decluttering. I decided due to work, christmas, and my birthday being all in December, when I was going to be decluttering, I would break things up. Each Week I'd give myself a task to work towards. For example the first couple of days of December would be focused on decluttering my Dog's things, the second week would be tackling clothing, the third et cetera. 

So there you have it, a little every day for the month of December focusing in on certain areas for a week. And you know, it started out pretty good. I was left thinking after this first like two day week that this might have to be a scrapped video. This was going almost too well.

I was inspired to to this video after watching one about the abundance of the middle class (https://youtu.be/3AhSNsBs2Y0). There was this project, where they took photos of basically everything in a selection of middle class homes. And it showcased the connection between middle classes, clutter and excess, and the mental health side of things. Clutter being seen as almost a reflection of people's mental state. Clutter is stressful to look at, to constantly work around, and this idea of "I can't get rid of it because what if I need it someday". So here I was starting on a journey to reduce my clutter.

A few days, in and I slowly started to feel my own anxiety creep in. So I decided to take some of it off camera. Some of my things are a bit personal, like paperwork that I don't want to accidently dox myself with. This off cameras anxiety quickly spiraled. Here I was, trying to declutter for the benefit of less anxiety but was in the thick of rising stress.

I spent a fair amount of time just evaluating my space and trying to figure out things. Evaluating my space meant realizing I had not been decluttering at all. I have just been moving things around constantly. My anxiety heightened, I moved my whole bed back to the other side of the room! Convincing myself that a different layout is what I need. Then the feeling of defeat when moving my bed did not suddenly spark motivation to actually declutter.

Instead, I got on camera to say [cut to me on camera saying that I keep pushing things around] So I got a trash bag and started again. And too be fair, I have one pile of donate and I filled a whole trash bag to toss.

Anxiety now gone, I still don't feel decluttered. I genuinely prefer my bed where it is now, under the window, but I feel I need bookcases under the TV area to continue with the organization that comes along side Decluttering. I have a lot of things that I like having out and getting to see, but they need surfaces to live on. Which means that they feel cluttered on the few surfaces I do have for them. 

Also another thing I did not factor, is that my room is the storage access point. So when we don't feel like, or have time to, bring down the ladder and putting stuff up. They pile and live in my room as their purgatory. So this is where I'm at. 31 days later...

Not exactly where I thought I'd be. But hey, I am a work in progress. So while I did not fully declutter and simplify my life in some way in 31 days, I did move my bed and that is quite the feat for one person. Queen sized beds are heavy and bulky haha. No, I learned that addressing the clutter with a deadline is almost more stressful for me than without a hard deadline. And being that Christmas means a lot of storage access and things living in my room, it probably is not the best of times to do it. But I did manage to get one bag of clutter solved, which is a start.

I hope to declutter more going forward, and hopefully a bookcase will help with the 'things living on surfaces' roadblock I seem to be hitting. So with all that said, What would you like to see me try next? Let me know if you have faced the same rising anxiety of trying to tackle decluttering I have. Thank you for reading. I post every Saturday on YouTube and periodically on Instagram!