Up until recently, I thought minimalism was easy. I never had much emotional attachment to things, clothes, or the food in my refrigerator. Thus, it was never difficult for me to pare down to the bare essentials. What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was paring down that which was entirely disconnected from emotion already: my junk drawer.
Every household has a junk drawer, arguably every household has to have a junk drawer. No matter how many categories you divide your belongings into, some things unelaborately only fit into one category: Junk.
I moved into a new apartment at the beginning of 2018, and since I threw out or donated most of my belongings during the moving process, it was a great opportunity to establish a system that would enable me to live a clean, polished, simple life free of clutter. My grand plan for managing junk was a humble shoebox on a high shelf in my coat closet which I scribbled on the side in bold Sharpie, “JUNK.” I told myself that no matter what, this junk box would be the limit to my junk accumulation. If the box was full and a new possession needed to enter the box, something else needed to go. Easy.
But as I should have known by then, simple doesn’t mean easy.
By mid 2019, roughly 18 months later, my plan had terrifically failed. The junk box had overflowed and was accompanied on its high shelf by junk-category things piled beside the box, and now a drawer in my kitchen had been filled—to the point that it was difficult to open—by a miscellaneous array of whatchamacallits and thingamabobs. My should-be easy junk management plan had failed.
So I did what one in my predicament should do, I ran to my support group. I created a new thread in the Only What Matters member community titled, “How do you control the accumulation of junk?” A more moderate alternative to how I felt in the moment, which was more accurately conveyed as, “HELP! TOO MUCH JUNK!” In my post, I explained with brevity what I explained above here. Putting a bow on it, “Trimming my wardrobe was easy, but how do you deal with the collection of junk?”
Responses were swift and supportive, but none of them quite clicked with me like the one left by Justin.
“[I’d] think about shifting how you think about those items. The label itself — “junk” — shows you feel negatively about these items.”
He was correct, I did. He continued.
“They’re things you wish you didn’t have or have to deal with.”
Still entirely correct. Again.
“And so they exist in this purgatory, kept around until you can throw them out, never truly welcome in your space. But I think part of dealing with junk is acknowledging, however begrudgingly, that you’re keeping it around for a reason, and give it a home somewhere.”
And that was when it hit me. Of course! Like so many issues before it that seem impossible to grapple with, this wasn’t a junk problem at all. It was a branding problem. With my bold Sharpie uncapped 18 months prior, I had literally written off everything that ever entered that fateful shoebox as excess, waste; a byproduct of modern life in which small household goods can only be purchased in quantities greater than one.
In order to truly work with these things, I had to accept the fact that I have them because I either need them periodically or will need them at some point in the future. These things were not junk, they were tools. Suddenly, I had a simple rule I could work with and build off of:
If something will not be used periodically or at some point in the future, get rid of it. Otherwise, respect it.
And so I took to organizing. It was easy, even though getting to this point was not. Having a basic rule to abide by made decision making effortless and quick. Before the minute hand on my clock made a complete revolution, I had achieved a balance I was extremely happy with.
My shoebox, still labeled JUNK, was now filled with half as many belongings as it was before, and those items still in it were organized neatly: Cables bundled, hard drives stacked, pens and pencils moved to a separate cup (a gift from a friend purpose-built for holding pens and pencils that I wasn’t using for some weird reason), envelopes and stamps pressed flat, loose coins moved to a repurposed mason jar, and papers scanned and discarded. The junk drawer, now affectionately-if-not-compulsorily referred to as my miscellaneous drawer, followed the same path. Both are now neat, organized, and most importantly, only contain that which I have deemed necessary to keep.
Strangely, my takeaway from this experience is rather KonMarian (I sincerely hope it’s not too soon to coin such a term). By accepting that the things I had unaffectionately labeled as junk all came into my possession because I saw value in them in the past, I was able to quickly and easily work through them. Those that continued to hold value I kept, and for those that didn’t, I simply discarded them. But I never could have reached that understanding if I continued to hold the belief that all of it was junk.
Comment below or on the thread that inspired this post in the Only What Matters member community.