A Cluttered Life
Seeing Past the Shame and Embracing the Treasure
What is Clutter?
The Oxford Dictionary defines clutter as a lot of things in an untidy state.
In this post, I take a deep dive into various facets of a cluttered life and try my best to challenge the traditional notion that clutter is inherently negative. I have my own demons associated with clutter, so I'll be trying to convince myself as much as you.
Will you agree with me? Read on and let me know what you think in the comments!
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Growing Up with Clutter
Clutter has always been a constant feature in my life. It is something almost all of us live with to varying degrees.
The house I grew up in was cluttered in a ‘‘my mum loves buying stuff on sale but doesn't like throwing things away’’ kind of way. I used to be embarrassed by it. As a teenager, I would clean furiously before inviting friends over, but due to the quantity of ‘‘stuff’’, the clutter always persisted. Instead of being removed, it was simply shifted to a new location.
When I grew up amongst clutter and lived amongst it, I felt shame. Clutter was such a poignant part of my childhood that I even created this glorious piece of art for a school project to immortalise it.
Clutter in Adulthood
When I moved out of home and lived with my boyfriend (now husband), the all too familiar clutter remained but to a much smaller extent. So small, in fact, that I hardly noticed it was there. However, to my husband, who was brought up in a completely clutter-free home, the little clutter collections I accumulated in our shared space were unsightly and unnecessary.
Finding the sweet spot for how much clutter is too much clutter seems to be subjective. Navigating the fine line between cozy clutter and overwhelming chaos is a personal journey that we, as a couple, continue to explore together.
Once we had kids, clutter and outright "mess" became a constant we could not avoid. And it was the kind of clutter we had never experienced before. Boxes, shelves, and drawers filled with toys, books, and knick-knacks that would refuse to remain contained and be dispersed and discarded across all corners of the house and yard by tiny humans. Every day is a perpetual treasure hunt for missing toys found in unlikely places. We often avoid having people over to the house because it is just too messy and cluttered!
And then that feeling would come creeping back. Shame.
Reframing Our Thinking About Clutter
I think we need to reframe our thinking and attitudes towards clutter.
It's important to remind ourselves that clutter is a perpetual and evolving testimony of a life in motion. A life that is being lived freely with stuff that gives us enjoyment and makes our lives easier, is a life that inevitably has clutter in it.
Memory Keeping with Clutter and Junk
I've come to embrace clutter in a whole new way in the form of memory-keeping through junk journaling. A junk journal or trash journal, as it's also called, is a unique visual representation of a cluttered life. Throughout life, we collect pieces of paper that often get thrown out with no regard for the memory held within it or the beauty and meaning you can associate with it. Think gift cards, receipts, product packaging, stamps, stickers, or a word or illustration that catches your eye in a magazine. It's all beautiful clutter you can treasure and keep in a junk journal to hold a memory of a certain time or place or to create aesthetic pages for the pure enjoyment of it.
This new and therapeutic creative outlet has me seeing clutter as treasure rather than trash. Here’s a flip-through video of the very first junk journal I made as a family memories keepsake for my kids:
Funnily enough, this new hobby resulted in me adding a whole new layer of junk journaling clutter to my home that didn't exist before, solidifying my cluttered life even further.
A Mind Full of Clutter
Along with the physical clutter of stuff, I feel as though my mind is full of clutter at times too. I wonder if the two correlate somehow.
There are always too many tabs open in my brain at any one time where I hardly finish an action or thought in its entirety before moving on to the next.
Again, I feel shame about my cluttered mind, messing up my thoughts with clutter compacting clutter faster than I can clear it. There is always so much to think about at any given time in a cluttered mind, and it can be hard to find order in that mess.
How can I clean the clutter in my home if I can't even clean the clutter in my own mind?
The Positives of a Cluttered Mind
And so my cluttered life persists, both internally and externally, but my mind draws me back to the positives of it, and I hope this will do the same for you if you have a cluttered mind like mine.
When you have a cluttered mind, it means that your mind is alive and vibrant in thought, not sitting dormant watching the world pass by.
My mind wants to be absorbed in everything there is to think about, and why wouldn't it? There are so many different, amazing and sometimes perfectly ordinary things to think about. If only my actions could keep up with the lofty expectations my mind imposes on me!
The Trendiness of Clutter
And then if we pull our view back to a cluttered life as a whole, I would really like to start on a positive note here. Clutter can, in fact, be trendy and aesthetic.
I am part of the Moody Maximalism Décor Facebook group where cluttered décor is all the rage, but why did I join this group? And why did I join nostalgia collector groups to gawk at shelves filled with collectible clutter? And why do I adore walking through antique shops, bookshops, or quaint gift shops bursting at the seams with delightful stuff?
Because I genuinely enjoy looking at beautiful and aesthetically pleasing clutter. Clutter that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. And obviously, other people do too. Some people and brands sell products that embrace the cluttered aesthetic such as Martina Calvi, which proves the point that there is no shame in clutter. Well, the right kind of clutter anyway!
A Life of Clutter
Beyond pleasing aesthetics, there are many other types of clutter in our lives, both bad and good. A cluttered inbox full of junk emails, streets cluttered with cars at peak hour, a day cluttered with tasks, plans and to-do lists. There can also be cluttered market stalls and people at a thriving event, rocks and pebbles cluttered at the edge of a lake bed, and any type of nature beyond a bare patch of grass can be seen as natural clutter too (rainforests are the best example of this).
Clutter adds character. Clutter adds depth. Clutter adds more to our lives, and adding more of the right clutter and shifting our perspective or removing the wrong clutter will hopefully give us the balance we crave in our cluttered lives.
Embracing Clutter
Clutter has a place in our lives, and the right kind of clutter can enhance our lives rather than hinder it.
So how did I do? Hopefully, this post has helped to reframe your perception of clutter in your home, in your mind and in life.
So, how is your cluttered life looking and feeling today?
Tell us more about a piece of clutter that is perpetually present in your world, whether it be a bowl of knick-knacks on a counter, a stack of boxes filled with odds and ends, that pile of laundry you've been meaning to get to, or a junk drawer jammed full of mystery items.
How does that clutter make you feel and is there a way you can reframe that clutter and shift your internal monologue about it?
Please do share your own clutter stories in the comments, and hopefully, we can all start embracing the beauty in our cluttered lives.
I love this so much Tania. Minimalism and perfect tidiness seem to be glorified, and I often look around my home wishing for that perfection and simplicity. I take photos where I’ve shoved all the clutter to one side to get that ‘perfect’ shot. But the ’clutter’ within my home hold moments and memories that would be lost without it. Your junk journal is an absolute work of art. Thank you so much for sharing 💛