Essentialism Is Decluttering Your Life, Not Your Closet
You finally got around to reorganizing the linen closet because you’re ready for things to finally change for the better.
You bought the matching baskets. You folded your towels into thirds the way the woman on YouTube showed you, the one with the spotless laundry room and the suspiciously unlimited amount of free time. You returned two of the throw pillows you were going to add to your collection and you gave away seventeen things that don’t spark joy.
And you still woke up at 3 a.m. with your chest on fire.
Here's the thing nobody in the blah colored corner of the wellness industry is going to admit to: the “stuff” was never the problem. The overwhelm you are drowning in right now has nothing to do with how many decorative objects are in your living room and everything to do with how much of yourself you've agreed to give away. The stuff on your shelves is not the cause of the drain.
You aren’t overwhelmed because you own too much stuff, although you have been convinced that that is the problem. You are burned out because you started to recognize you are living a life that was built around everyone else's needs. Every wellness trend you have tried gave you a new task to perform when what you actually needed was permission to drop your burden.
First, The Lie of Minimalism
The people who are trying to sell you Minimalism as an aesthetic sold you a very pretty lie.
The lie goes like this: if you own fewer things, you will feel less burdened. Clear surfaces equal a clear mind. A capsule wardrobe will simplify your decisions and owning only 33 items of clothing will drop your cortisol levels.
To be fair, there is a version of Minimalism that is a legitimate philosophy about intentional ownership. And sadly, it became a Pinterest aesthetic with white kitchens, bookshelves arranged by color, and the quiet implication that your chaos is a housekeeping problem.¹
That Pinterest version did something specific worth naming: it took the very real feeling of too much that women were experiencing and gave them another project to accomplish without ever touching the actual source of the weight.² It tried to cure a systemic problem into an interior design solution.
We make thousands of decisions daily and the quality of our decision degrades as the day goes on.³ The wellness version of Minimalism clocked that and said: reduce your choices, reduce your load. Fewer items in your closet, fewer decisions about what to wear.
The decisions that are actually crushing you are not whether to keep the blender. They are the invisible decisions that never stop. Who is managing the school schedule. Who remembered to call the pharmacy. Who noticed the thing before it became a crisis and quietly handled it without anyone ever knowing there was a thing to notice.⁴
No amount of reorganizing your pantry touches that.
What Essentialism Is
Essentialism is not an aesthetic, it’s not a cleaning method and it’s also not about owning less stuff, though that can be a byproduct.
Essentialism, as Greg McKeown defines it, is the disciplined pursuit of less — but the less he's talking about is commitments, obligations, yeses, and the invisible social contract underlying all women’s lives.⁵ It is the practice of asking what is essential and then having the audacity to let everything else go.
That is a fundamentally different project than decluttering.
Minimalism asks: what can I get rid of? Essentialism asks: what actually deserves to be here?
One of those questions is about your stuff. The other one is about your life.
When I talk about Essentialism within The Essential pillar here at Finding My Fierce, I'm not giving you a system for organizing your kitchen. I'm talking about the kind of ruthless simplicity that starts with your energy and your attention, the two areas you have been hemorrhaging in every direction while the wellness industry handed you another beautifully formatted checklist to add to your to-do list.
Why We Fell for the Clean Your Closet Version
Why do so many of us believe the cluttered closet theory of overwhelm?
Because the closet version is manageable.
You could do it on a Saturday while the kids are napping and the spouse is fishing. You could see the immediate results and pat yourself on the back for actually finishing something for once. You could post the before and after as validation that you do indeed have your shit together. You could feel the specific satisfaction of a solved problem in a life full of problems that don’t get solved.⁶
The real work of essentialism is this: looking at your calendar, your commitments, the relationships that are all withdrawal and no deposit, the life roles you stepped into and have been performing ever since, that work type of work is slower, messier, and it does not photograph well.
Essentialism also asks you to stand up for yourself. And for most of the women reading this, disappointing people lands like a moral failure.⁷ The Good Girl programming runs deep, and it would much rather you reorganize the bathroom cabinet than ask you to take something off your plate that someone else put there.
The minimalism aesthetic gave us a way to feel like we were addressing the overwhelm without ever having to do the scary part. And the wellness industry, the one selling serenity diffusers and capsule wardrobes and color-coordinated planner inserts, has absolutely no financial interest in pointing that out.⁸
Choosing the Things That Need to Go
Real essentialism is when you stop volunteering for the thing you never wanted to do in the first place but just kept doing because no one else stepped up. The guilt from not being The Good Girl was unbearable so you gave in.
Essentialism is looking at your week and noticing that about sixty percent of what's on your list is there because of an expectation you absorbed so long ago you forgot it wasn't yours.⁹
It’s when you finally say I don't have the capacity for that right now without a TED talk explanation of why.
Women over 40 are particularly primed for essentialism and particularly overdue for it because perimenopause is already dismantling the neurological mechanisms that used to let you push through on adrenaline and willpower.¹⁰ This is a stage in life when tolerance for bullshit decreases because your body is done performing at level of capacity you never actually had, you were just able to push through.
But no more.
Where to Start (And It's Not Your Closet)
Start with your yeses. The ones that come out of your mouth before you've even checked whether you have anything left to give. The ones that are powered by obligation, fear of conflict, or the very old belief that your value is proportional to your usefulness.¹¹
Ask the essential question: if I weren't afraid of the reaction, would I still say yes to this?
If you want to start from the full framework for what essentialism looks like when it's applied to your energy, your attention, and the invisible contracts running your life, visit Essentialism: The Art of Focussing On What Really Matters.
If this article spoke to you or answered questions you don’t have answers to, leave me a comment below, I respond to every comment. You might inspire other women who are struggling with their identity.
Melissa
Sources
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McKeown, G. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Crown Business, 2014.
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