#studywithez

[studywithez-blog]

Minimalism - The First Step.

Good Morning, Whoever you are. 

As someone who likes to think that they are relatively in touch with themselves and the world around them, the thought of losing the materialistic side of my life was one that should have come quite naturally as I have grown up and become more detached from the life I was brought up with. I have always been a person who saves items and things ‘just in case’ or ‘one day you might need this’ when the reality is that I wont; there will never be that just in case. It is also fair to say that I have always had an issue with impulse buying items and clothes that I actually do not need. Either I do not have that disposable income to spend, or I really just do not need it.

I first started looking into the idea of minimalism around a year ago. I had just returned from a holiday with my closest friend and we were sat in my room at my student house looking at all of the rubbish that I was containing in my room. At the time I was quite lucky and happened to have the largest room in the 6 bed slum of a flat, but that does not mean that I had to fill the whole area with my possessions.

The first step of my very slow journey into minimalism was the moment I realized that a) I do not have the money to sustain this lifestyle and I do not wish to spend my life being controlled by what is in my pocket and b) I want to be able to fit everything I need and own into a small vehicle, making moving (or escaping as comes later in this journey) an easy feat. 

This started simply by throwing away a lot of things that I didn't need, I do not miss them and I do not find myself pining for them. That was the first step for me, proving that I was not attached to the material. However a this point I was still left with a lot of possessions I did not need. This was brought to life on the day I moved into my first professional house share, filling the newly refurbished room with items that I did not need for the year I was pretending to be an adult for. 

For the 6 months that I lived in that house share i just gained more and more items that I will probably end up throwing away each time i do a large purge of items. This was closely related to the fact that I had an actual income, leading to me saving next to no money for my first 4 months of my placement. This left me shocked and scared, maybe I had a spending issue? Maybe I am just not ready to be in the real world. Scared to get myself in trouble, I sat down and started to work out where I was making my mistakes. The first was the drastic amount of rent that I was paying each month.

£550 per month to live in a poorly insulated garage conversion in a dodgy part of town with 6 other people, some of whom were European meaning that at 12 midnight when I was trying to sleep they were just getting on with cooking their evening meal. The cultural differences between some of my housemates and the landlord led to many a heated argument and a lot of uncomfortable meetings. Needless to say, the move to the flat was expensive, yes, but I have saved more money in these past 5 months than I have ever before. This enabled me to put a deposit down on a place in London, and start paying rent, go on a girls holiday for a week in Ibiza and still feed myself, pay rent and enjoy my free time. The only downside of the move has been the realization that I am still materialistic. 

My next move into my London property (hopefully the final London property I will ever live in), is a single bedroom in a house with 5 other girls. I am looking forward to this with great excitement, minus the amount of things that I have. This is where I currently stand with my minimalism journey. 

Each week I will post an update of what I have done, what issues I have faced and how I have tackled them. This is going to be my crash course in minimalism.

See you next week, 

Ez.