My parents are both borderline hoarders and I grew up in a home filled with things we never used, looked at or even liked. There were at least 40 places in the house where clutter reigned freely and nobody ever questioned it. I thought it was normal. When I was about 10 i started realizing that my friends weren't exceptional because they had more or less tidy homes, but that we were because ours was a mess. At that time my room was filled with so many nick nacks that I could barely sit down without blocking the air supply of one of my teddy bears or knocking something over. At 13 I chucked out everything that I didn't want, need or find beautiful after having read two of the books that were cluttering up our house in my mother's Amazon pile that she never even looked at, both by Dawna Walters. The first one was about general housekeeping habits and how to stay on top during a hectic everyday life, and the second was about decluttering. It changed my life. My room was suddenly empty and it felt so freeing. I loved my new way of life and I even started cleaning, doing laundry and everything else a housewife should do, also at 13. Nobody else really cared did they? But my life had changed drastically and for the better. I kept maintaining my decluttering project by purging regularly and I managed extraordinarily well.
As the years passed somehow it all just slipped. I stepped up again several times but never as successfully and eventually I would always fall back. I have become a mother now and I live with a wonderful man, but we have a serious problem with clutter. In the course of a year we have managed to gather so much clutter that when we recently moved I almost couldn't make myself pack all our trinkets, it was literally painful to look at all the sh*t, pardon my language, that we had accumulated over such a small amount of time. The decluttering has already begun and I am extremely motivated, but I can't help but feel rather overwhelmed still. I am looking forward to sharing this experience with you, this forum is incredibly inspiring. I have a blog where I share my thoughts on different subjects, organizing and decluttering as well, I just wrote a post about my approach to this project. If anybody would like to check it out you can find it here: http://www.modusvivendibymaia.com
You are all very brave people.
Clutter free love to all of you,
Maia
