Days 5–6: Journey to Minimalism

July 8

Today was rather uneventful, but I did bring everything in my pile to Goodwill. Even though that was mostly what I did today, I think I had a major mental breakthrough. As soon as I dropped off my boxes and bags at Goodwill, I instantly felt lighter and calmer.

I guess it doesn’t seem like much, but just the act of bringing the pile out of my house reassured me that I’m making the right decisions here.

Unfortunately, I didn’t do too much more physical decluttering, however I did continue with digital/ social media forms. As I went through Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook, I realized that I follow a lot of pages that I don’t even know who they are or why I started in the first place. I never realized how overwhelming and stressful I felt scrolling through social media, until I unfollowed too many accounts to remember, and I instantly felt lighter and happier.

I guess one of my fears of the social media “cleanse” if you will, was that I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings by unfollowing them. Even people I don’t talk to anymore. Saying that aloud may sound weird but I think I’ve fallen into this trap of depending on social media more than necessary, but because technology and social media is such a big part of our culture today, I never realized the negative impact it had on me.

I’ve stopped “liking” posts on Facebook just for the sake of liking something. I’m trying to be more deliberate about how and when I use social media because it’s so easy to get lost in it, and I find myself losing touch with the world around me.

July 9

Very short post for today…

Today, I planned on doing some more de-cluttering and organizing, but leave it to me to get a rib injury from moving boxes of books (on the day I went to Goodwill).

I am not allowed to do much more physical work for a few weeks, but maybe that’s good because it’ll give me more time to re-evaluate and keep crafting my version of minimalism and what I want my experience with it to be like. I’m starting to do some more research on other people’s experiences with Minimalism and hopefully I’ll find more about how they defined it for themselves.

Back in my first post, I mentioned Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, The Minimalists. I found a 6 episode mini series on Youtube called “Making Minimalism,” where they show the behind the scenes work of their documentary, “Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things,” (available on Netflix). I plan to watch both the film, and the behind the scenes series to learn more about Minimalism in general but also to hopefully learn how to craft what direction I want to go with my journey.

More to come in the near future…

Sarah Joan Salvador

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Writing to make sense of life…

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