My family and I recently completed a relaxing staycation in Phoenix and I loved that the rental home had several back copies of Real Simple magazine (along with several others publications like Dwell and Good Housekeeping). It is rare for me to buy magazines now because they are often so chock full of advertisements instead of useful content. This reality is why I will often pop onto the businesses’ websites instead to jump straight to the content I want to find. I selectively picked up this February 2020 copy, knowing that I had some decluttering I wanted to do in our current home.

This past year my heart has eagerly focused on wanting to move. I want to move up in my career. I want to move in the physical sense of exercising more, something that took a backseat due to health issues. I want to travel more and I accept staycations and out-of-state travel as options. We recently receiving our updated passports, too, so I expect we can start saving up for traveling out of country for an adventure next year or the year afterwards. My love for going to new places has been hampered by financial restrictions and also limited PTO (like most Americans). There are days my heart is jealous of persons living in European nations who can frequently hop on public transportation and move more easily from one nation to the next. Instead of sinking into that jealousy, I decided to do something proactive with my time.

My decluttering process also helps immensely with anxiety. Our home is just under 2,000 square feet and there are many days it feels like too much space to maintain. My body does not crave the micro apartments of New York City or Paris, but I would like something that feels more like a family home instead of a landing spot. My dad’s mom used to have a beautiful home on a lake in South Dakota. Some friends in Kentucky have a river that traverses part of their property. My dad’s home is located in a quiet neighborhood bordered by a little wooded area and there is a brewery hangout spot a short drive or a walk down the road in good weather. My younger sister lives in a home built in the 1960’s that has a layout I like a whole lot more than my complete open concept downstairs and her property is a short walk from a casual beach spot and a few restaurants. Their kids can stop in to get ice cream after playing in the water. I love that. We are getting some amenities like that where I live, but my mind still focuses on the house.

We bought in our current area for the local schools. After the pandemic hit and our daughter started schooling online, buying in this area was a decision I started to regret. It hasn’t entirely been a bad decision. I have a great relationship with my neighbor; I feel we are more like sisters than neighbors. A handful of restaurants that have gone in are great and the one that isn’t can easily be avoided. I cook better than their cooks do. The area is also very safe so we can go for walks, runs, and bike areas with very little concern for our safety. I still had to come to gripes with this box and the walls we live within. Our vacation rental provided a means to reassess the space we currently occupy. It can be years before I move out of state to somewhere like Kentucky, Indiana, or North Carolina (all still high on the list), but I can take the risk of selling sometime down the road and picking a new property that could be a better longtime investment due to growth in other communities.

This closet in the vacation rental provided a lot of inspiration that it can be easy to build storage to house more than what we need to retain for practicality purposes and sentimental concerns. I should have measured the closet because it does have room for seasonal and in-season storage needs. I like that it is setup in the master suite so you don’t have to go find things in other household closets for these items. The residence was about 2,800 square feet, so I had the chance to live in a larger home to see what works or does not work at the footprint. I was most happy that each bedroom and the gathering areas has seating arrangements perfect for reading and that reality can be replicated in any home, regardless of its size.

Tackling what to downsize this time was a bit easier because I’ve been on this journey for years. Before we sold our first home in 2020, we had already donated hundreds of books, ill-fitting clothes and shoes, and tackled some excess papers. I still found we came into the new house with too much stuff! My obsession with journaling has gotten away from me over the years and with a clear mind, it was good to see most of those weren’t serving my needs. I tossed a middle school journal where I lamented my mother having a better relationship with my other siblings. I ripped apart a high school journal where I confronted, again, a boyfriend who was unfaithful for our entire relationship. (He has grown into a better man and apologized. He is still married to the woman he cheated on me with, so there’s no repairing the friendship though. She and I aren’t going to be friends. The apology is enough.) A travel journal about my high school trip to Cape Verde was hardly anything more than discussing being an outsider among my American school peers. The best reminders of the trip are showcased in some loving photos I still keep to this day. 2024 was a repeat of paperwork reduction.

Paperwork and photos are my kryptonite.

I try not be overwhelmed and saddened by events I experienced, some things I put myself through, and people that I’ve lost.

Here’s what I parted ways with in 2024:

• Old Marine Corps cartoons I drew (keeping only two and a realistic pen drawing of Marines sleeping in MOPP)
• High School report cards and official transcripts (3.75 GPA doesn’t matter when you have two grad degrees)
• Marine Corps training certificates from Technical Escort school (I am not in the CBRN community anymore)
• Photo duplicates and bad quality photos
• Condolence cards after my mother’s death (I did keep one because my teacher wrote a lot of heartfelt messages)
• Old cards from my Grandmother with basic greetings (I did keep meaningful letters she wrote)
• Letters from one of my high school best friends (We are no longer friends and stopped talking about 2006)
• Old VA decision letters (after carefully shredding them because they contain PII)
• Board games we don’t play or don’t play often enough
• Books donated to the public library (Mine included There’s No Such Thing as An Easy Job, How to Pronounce Knife, Stiff, etc.)

I am trying to find a balance between Marie Kondo’s “Does is spark joy?” and the reality that some of my possessions are practical even if they don’t always bring me joy. I don’t follow a modern minimalism approach as I feel some of those houses come off real cold, but too much stuff makes me feel like I have too much to maintain and I lose track of what I already possess.

Staying in that rental where possessions can be spread out and breath a bit more was more helpful than I expected. I could see my hobbies haven’t changed all that much since my early 20’s. I grew to love cooking after separating from the Marine Corps. A family and friends centric kitchen and dining area will always be important to me. My mom worked hard to get me to love reading and that grounding activity still matters to me. Sure, I don’t need a library that rivals the one in “Beauty and the Beast.” Right now, I have a few on display and because a move is financially possible this year, some other favorites are tucked away, including Anna Kendrick’s Scrappy Little Nobody, DIY MFA, and Lauren Graham’s Talking As Fast as I Can: Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between). I am actually eager for Kelly Bishop’s The Third Gilmore Girl to be released later this year to add it to my collection.

Paring down photos is still an ongoing journey. I haven’t completely pared down my Marine Corps collection, but last year we finally tossed our Marine Corps recruit training yearbooks. They weren’t doing anything fabulous in our lives (and I’m hardly photographed plus mine look awful). I also destroyed the bulk of our excess Marine Corps camouflage uniforms last year too by rendering them unserviceable before they went into the trash. Our daughter is starting to be more interested in our Marine Corps careers, so I selectively set aside some photos not in albums. I figured this way she can easily find them when she wants to look at them and if not this weekend, maybe next weekend I will write down where I was at in them.

Clearing out some physical space in my life and more mental clarity is what my April needed. As a short snippet, I was reading through old journal entries sent to my family members and their letters to me. Revisiting these sentiments was a real strong clue that the Marine Corps needed to revamp how it treats service members in need of medical care and I should have trusted my instincts more. Decluttering can be calming although it does often bring trauma up to the surface.

Right now, we are in the process of adding a new fur baby to the family. My husband’s service dog will retire sometime this year and this new bundle of fluff will have a lot of hands-on training with the family to step into his role. In anticipating her arrival, I cleared out all the old veterinary invoices for our dog, Gregor, and the ones for our guy, Radar, who passed in 2022. Removing the vet bills was one of the hardest things to tackle this year. Our time with Gregor is limited based on his age and Radar’s death resulted from a swift decline in his health. I don’t have the heart right now to part ways with the journal entry I wrote for Radar just before his passing or the obituary I wrote after he passed.

My journey is a reminder it’s ok to keep even some sad memories. And it’s more important to talk about those experiences. We’re not meant to pent up all our pain. But when the right time comes, we can release it.

Shred useless papers. Burn or toss the photos that need to go. Write and edit your reflections.

Talk about it with your friends, family, and strangers (depending on your comfort level).

Declutter and regain your power to breath life into your dreams.