When is Enough, Enough?

I have too much stuff.

Don’t get me wrong…I’m not quite ready for one of those episodes of “Hoarders” (though I do like that show–it makes me feel better about my house!) But still…I have TOO, TOO MUCH.

The ironic thing about having too much stuff is that many of the things that I have are supposed to make my life easier. Unfortunately, spending two hours looking for something that’s supposed to make life easier–DOES NOT MAKE LIFE EASIER.

Somewhere along the way, I got sucked into a lifestyle of “more, more, more”. I suppose that I thought having more things would make my life more FabYOUlous. I was WRONG. Instead, it has made my life more frustrating, cluttered and frazzling. Frazzled is definitely NOT FabYOUlous.

Then…I got married and suddenly my stuff got joined with Superman’s stuff and believe it or not, he has far more stuff (I use the word stuff because it is more polite than the other word I’m thinking, though they both start with an “S”) than I do. Plus–we have two teenage boys living at home so we have to add their stuff to the equation as well. This stuff of ours is everywhere from our kitchen counter tops to the front of our fridge to under the sinks to under our beds. It isn’t ridiculous enough to be a health hazard or anything crazy like that, but it is enough to make our house sometimes feel cluttered instead of comfortable AND often leave me feeling overwhelmed.

So, my question for you today is WHEN is enough, enough?

I for one have definitely reached the “enough is enough” point in my own life but how about you? Do you have a place for everything and everything in it’s place or are you more like me and living a life of (somewhat) controlled chaos? How do you rectify the situation in your life when your stuff owns you as opposed to you owning it? For me, I think a first step is going to be a ginormous garage sale. I need to go through each area of our home and start to purge.

I don’t exactly know how my obsession with stuff began but I suspect that at one point in my life I somehow began to base my own self worth on the things that I owned. If I didn’t feel good about myself, I would try to feel good about the things that I possessed and imagine that they somehow increased my self worth. I’m happy that I’ve finally gotten to a place in my life where I don’t feel like I need things to make me feel better about myself but now it is time to come up with a plan to design a life that truly reflects the FabYOUlous person that I am becoming.

No–I’m not going to go all Henry David Thoreau in this endeavor to simplify my life–I am sure that even after my attempts at purging, I will still have WAY too much stuff to fit into a cabin in the woods. However; I am determined to bring a little bit of order and organization back to my life and to expend less energy tending to things and more energy tending to people, relationships, hobbies and important work…things that actually matter.

In striving to simplify my life and honor my urge to purge, I plan to take the following steps…I am going to go through each area of my house (not in one day!) and either pitch the things that I don’t love or use or set them aside for a garage sale and I am going to commit to getting rid of one thing for every new thing that I purchase. These might not be huge, monumental changes, but I’m hoping that they will help add a little more simplicity and peace to my life which in turn leads to a life that is much more FabYOUlous.

How about you? Is your life overstuffed? Do you need to simplify? What are a couple of steps that you can take to let go of stuff and grab hold of FabYOUlous? Think about it this week and come up with a plan!