I thought I would be happier with more. I didn’t care if I had to work harder, or spend more to get it. I thought it was worth it. I rewarded long work weeks with shopping and after a bad day, medicated with spending. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, but I can see my patterns quite clearly now that I’m not so busy and distracted.
Only a few, short years ago I had …
The Big Stuff
- house: 2000 sq. ft. home with yard, garage, attic, shed, fence, deck
- two cars with monthly payments
Furniture
- dining table with eight chairs
- kitchen table with six chairs
- patio table with six chairs
- living room and family room furniture
- guest room furniture
- office furniture
- two more bedrooms full of furniture
- more furniture in the garage that didn’t fit in the house
(There were three of us living in the house and we had 20 dining chairs.)
Apparel
- 3 closets full of clothes: mine, husband’s, daughter’s
- guest room closet full of clothes (overflow)
- hall closet full of coats and other clothes (overflow)
- boxes (many, many, boxes full of clothes) in the garage
- shoes, accessories, jewelry – too much to count, or wear.
(I wore 20% of my stuff 80% of the time.)
Stuff
- books: in the office, family room, kitchen, living room and bedrooms
- dvds
- board games
- jam-packed kitchen cabinets full of Tupperware, glasses, dishes, silverware, candles …
- office stuff – bulletin boards, printers, paper, shelves, in boxes, filing cabinets full of more paper
- art
- exercise equipment
- sporting gear
- boxes of stuff we rarely opened in a storage area in the garage
- stuff I don’t remember that filled the shed
- all the stuff we needed to take care of all the stuff
- miscellaneous: the most dangerous category of all
(if you walked through my house, you wouldn’t have thought there was too much. It looked just like the typical 2000 sq. foot home full of stuff.)
