I am a hoarder. Of the information variety. But not like those people on those reality TV series where you can barely get into the apartment, have infestations, rotting food, and dead animals buried under piles of STUFF and are caving in floors and whatever else is clearly a mental illness that refuse to I submit to. I fight the battle with mental health everyday (current status: winning!), but I refuse to be one of those people.

My mother loves to decorate and really missed her calling in interior design, but it’s a bit compulsive and I realized a few years ago that she is afraid of negative space. You can’t have a bare wall or corner, something needs to go there, or be placed here, be it a painting, sculpture, or a piece of furniture. The difference between us however, is that everything has a place, so her house is always tidy. Until you got to my room.

I figured out a long time ago that keeping a cluttered living space was a defense mechanism, a way to have control over something in my life, no matter how unhealthy or destructive the behavior was. It’s the same as a kid acting out to get attention. Kids know what good behavior is, but no one pays attention to you until you do something you shouldn’t.

By the time I acknowledged what I was doing and started to change the behavior, I got kicked out.

Gotta love Life!

I read something in a magazine, I keep the magazine for “research” or I tear the page out, “for later”. I have no order to this system and I never seem to get around to using the information for anything.

Well, no more!

I’ve entertained the idea of minimalism for several years when I first started reading Zen Habits. I knew I needed to release this paper that was crowding my space (physical and mental), not to mention my life, but I wasn’t ready to release my attachment to them. I tried to justify my habit by pointing out that since I didn’t “waste” money on the latest fashions, electronics, or tchotchkes, I could have my paper.

Sigh.

But I also wasn’t ready to live with the idea of reducing my life to 100 things.

C’mon now.

100 things??

I own more than a hundred books, are you kidding me?

And, who doesn’t like STUFF?

So yeah, minimalism wasn’t happening for me then.

But I am not my things and my life shouldn’t be defined by them.

And now that I’ve been paying for storage for a couple of years and I want to stop paying for storage and also get a place of my own, it’s time to revisit this approach to achieving a simpler, less consumptive lifestyle.

Going back through Zen Habits and later, Mnmlst, I’ve found that I have evolved and am ready to embrace a new life of less stuff. With a few exceptions.

I am going to work towards living with 100 things, but I’m counting my books and my kitchen supplies as one thing each. [update: I've decided to embrace this definition of minimalism, which releases me from quantifying what's important to just focusing on releasing what I don't need for the life that I want.]

I don’t care how digitized and augmented we become, nothing beats being able to pull a book off my shelf, thumb through the pages and curl up with a good read. I read and re-read my books often, and many of them are research for my personal health and professional life and I’m just not interested in parting with them now. [update: I was browsing through some titles a couple of days after I posted this and realized that I could let go of some of them. Yeah!!]

I’m not a product junkie so I don’t have a lot of makeup or beauty care products to throw out. The major things I have to contend with are clothes I have no use for, old computer stuff, random knickknacks and a few sentimental things that have value only because I gave it to them, and these papers.

All of the paper is going to be recycled, but I’m concerned about how to dispose of other things like old computers, cords, and the random stuff that I don’t want to throw out. Very little of it is worth selling, and I’m debating whether to turn them into functional upcycled works a la Etsy or just put out a curb alert.

I’m using these last six weeks or so of 2011 to clear everything out and start fresh for 2012.

I hope you’ll join me.