When you enter my home, your eyes are very likely having a museum experience of ordinary things. Like one of those museum-of-lost-objects exhibits that cool people do with ordinary everyday stuff (and get paid for) that I probably will never monetize out of sheer idiocy and absence of gumption. [side tip to get gumption: repeat 'gumption' out loud to yourself till you giggle.]
The first thing you notice when you enter my home is—I have a problem. Some clichés I absolutely love being—the lady who lives alone in her small Apartment Problem house in a getting-gentrified-soonly neighbourhood with her giant rainforest and a cat. Recently, I decided my de-cluttering phase should apply to my plants too. Because they're there and some of them are very annoying. I am sorry I do not subscribe to this always good to have more plants theory, I immediately know a plant noob from the way their breath never reaches their diaphragm when they talk about cuttings.
Listen to me. Some plants just don't want to be with you, they don't like you at all, you can try giving them different soils, different environments, different composts, different pots, even different songs. Some of them just want to fucking die on you to prove a point. Relatable.
Chotu segue: I don't terribly have a problem with plants dying on me. I used to be something of a gardening consultant publicly (still am, privately) and people used to pay me to tell them how to keep their plants alive. I have never in my life had to exercise more diplomacy with people always trying to keep their plants alive. And I'm sure me subtly leading them to the heart of my gardening philosophy—that gardening is surrender, that your plants will fucking die, your job is to not keep them alive, your job is to learn them, and cry into them when you can't pay your therapy bills—annoyed the crap out of them when they went to bed in their minimalistic, aesthete four poster from their grandmother story homes.
Living with plants means you will never be one of those with an interesting Ammamma inheritance bed that is just v clean and aesthete to look at. There will always be too many roots growing out of your walls. You can just never be one-giant-plant lady who can see blank walls, and it's blank walls that create the illusion of space in a home.
Another problem: my living room has too much colour, too many posters and paintings that probably have many things to say if you sit down. I have many books (yes I read them all, I don't hoard books, I have never been on a Blossoms' date, Churchstreet is an ADHD nightmare are you nuts??). I have been unsuccessful at arranging my books by colour (to my librarian friends, psychotic, yes, i understand) in the hopeful attempt to 'aesthetise' and understimulate. But book covers with letters and typographies all muddled together will always overstimulate the average mule.
I'm supposed to be a horse running free in a meadow, not what my royal horseness is doing right now: tip toeing around overstimulating objects at an amusement park. Neigh, not allowed.
So naturally, in full defiance of evidence that I will never be a blank-wall, soft-calm, Korean housewife with shiny wooden spatulas, I have been trying my whole adult life to be exactly that. Can you tell my YT algorithm is 80% how to be a minimalist homebody? It is time I accept that I will never succeed at this. Not because of the things I have, but because of the things I am.
My reality check/affirmations:
1. I need to see things in front of me or they disappear so they will always be on display.
2. I have to radically accept that I already probably am lonely lady in Gotham city with cats and trees and that the people who wrote that character with such sadness and pity were probably men.
3. The reminder that mess is always a sign of life. My house is a visual reminder that I'm trying to keep myself so wonderfully alive.
4. I live with a cat. Even if I sell everything I own today, tomorrow morning there will be things on the floor for me to clean up that my cat discovered. Empty things don't come with cats.
5. This maximalist-minimalist dichotomy is beginning to sound a lot like the made-up/over-romanticised introvert-extrovert Instagram illustration-inspiration nonsense. I have bought into this nonsense just one step below checking my Co-Star. I must stop. (That's what my Co-Star said today).
6. I don't know about loving myself, but this whole endeavour to have a minimalistic home has been feeling a lot like me trying to like myself. Become a different person immediately etc etc. Maybe I need to ask: why am I so desperate to like everything about myself? What will happen if there are things that I just never ever like about me, mother?
7. I can have a maximalist home without being a maximalist person. [Now I'm just in the negotiation stage of grief]
ONE DAY I WILL BECOME A PERSON WHO BUILDS THINGS WITH CLOSED STORAGE SPACE.
Till that day, I'm going to stare at the things I have and breathe the abundance in. I will never have a minimalistic home. There doesn't have to be a looking-forward-wuw-great-life spin on this ending. Bye.