My Year of Decluttering—Purging 365 Things Over 365 Days

Why and how I’m seeking belonging with my belongings

yes, that’s actually my desk under all that stuff

Welcome to My Year of Decluttering! The short version is that starting today, I’ll be getting rid of one physical item a day for the next 365 days, ending on September 15, 2026. I’ll be tracking them all, posting photos and descriptions on Threads and Substack Notes, hopefully daily, and summarizing them in this newsletter.

I started to do some of this decluttering over the summer but for me, public accountability is an important part of keeping me on track, and I liked the idea of something daily I could point to and say, “Well, even if you did nothing else, you did that.”

In some ways, this feels like a frivolous exercise. The world is a dumpster fire and here I am trying to get rid of some things? But while the world is indeed full of horrible news, in my home and personal life, I’m trying to create as much stability and support for my family and myself as I can.

I don’t want to argue every few weeks with my boyfriend about the possessions I have lying around that I’m not using but can’t seem to let go of. I don’t want to waste more precious minutes looking for a pair of earrings or dress (for a few weeks this spring, I thought I’d lost one of my favorite dresses and it was just hiding behind some other ones in my closet) or shoes or book or piece of paper (somehow, despite having files for all the important categories in my life, I still misplace important papers). I don’t want to wake up and feel stressed the second I open my eyes because there are things in front of me that shouldn’t be where they currently are or I’m unsure about owning or just seem like they don’t belong.

Right now, my mind and life feel far more cluttered than I prefer. I’m in the midst of getting over a bad cold that’s settled into my lungs and activated my asthma, so breathing, an act I normally take for granted, is a struggle when I’m in between at-home albuterol treatments, especially at night. And even though officially I “don’t work,” in paying job terms, I have various creative projects I’m in the midst of or have on my agenda for the fall that I think about longingly, wanting to get them started or off my plate.

I’m trying everything I can to ensure that my lit mag Open Secrets continues to grow, and am very excited about what we’re publishing and doing, but trying to spread the word can often feel like a cloying, never-ending round of busywork that sometimes makes me wonder what the point of it all is. This means that it’s hard for me to relax at the end of a long day, because I start to feel guilty that I should be pushing-pushing-pushing myself to check things off my list so that at some future date, when I’ve truly earned it, I can really relax (see also my latest column, “Is ADHD Why I Have Trouble Taking Real Vacations?”)

The fact that I’m turning 50 in November makes this desire to have a less overwhelmed mind even stronger. For most of my life, I’ve assumed that the physical stuff I own doesn’t contribute to that mental strain, that it’s something I can overlook when I’m not using it, considering it more of a backdrop to my day-to-day comings and goings, more scenery than sensory. I haven’t been focused on the sprawls of paper and magazines and books and blankets and boxes and random tidbits I will always say yes to keeping if I can’t think of a good reason to throw them away, almost like my eyes skate over them until they reach the vision they want to see.

But in the last year of being a mom, they haven’t been as easy to ignore. They’ve started to nag at me, haunting and taunting, as if they want me to know that they will be the boss of me until I turn the tables. I want to be more intentional about every aspect of my life, and starting with my possessions feels like the right direction, as a way to unlock that intentionality and help me focus on what I actually want to be doing with my life, rather than just moving the same handful of items around and around to different places in my home, or shoving them in a messy closet.

one of my 2 very messy closets

While I’ve read many versions of the idea that “if you have a clean house, you’re ignoring your writing,” and I’ve definitely been known to flutter around dusting and vacuuming and doing laundry in order to postpone sitting down in front of my laptop, I want to see if it’s possible for me to have a clean(ish) house and also be the writer I hope to be.

I knew that I wanted to make the process meaningful, rather than just rampage through my room and closets, have them look briefly nice and tidy, but then revert to filling them back up, which is usually how the cycle goes for me. There are currently various decluttering methods gaining popularity online, with some like the 30 Bags in 30 Days challenge (where, as the name implies, you throw out 30 bags of things in 30 days), designed to get rid of large amounts of stuff in a small amount of time. That felt too frantic to me, and definitely not something I could keep up with.

I was very inspired by Christine Platt’s book The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living with Less. It resonated with me deeply because Platt had found herself facing too much stuff after she had to move from a house into a much smaller space. She has been there and lived through it and used what she’s learned to improve her life (and help others do the same), not just downsize her stuff. She gets that the stuff, even the clothes you bought and never wore, still mean something to you, whatever you wind up doing with them. She gets that there’s sentimentality and remorse and confusion and a whole jumble of emotions that goes along with downsizing; that for many of us, this isn’t merely a math problem, it’s also a soul problem.

I don’t even have the book in front of me to quote from because I have so many books and other items I haven’t put away that I’m not sure where it went. So I’ll tell you why the book was such a touchstone for me: Her approach. Platt isn’t trying to sell her readers on a Marie-Kondo-my-way-or-the-highway type of approach. Platt isn’t trying to rush her readers through a process they aren’t ready for.

For her, minimalism isn’t about an esthetic or one-size-fits-all rules. It’s about an ongoing lifestyle and conscious choices about both what to discard and what to keep and, perhaps most importantly, how to find meaning in what we do keep so that we appreciate those items, rather than just look at them or be aware that they exist.

I found her tone so welcoming, so big tent, that it seemed possible that even a hoarder like me could embark on a minimalism project. I’m not saying I’m going to become a minimalist or that I’m getting rid of everything my boyfriend wants me to or that I always have a rational reason for keeping things besides “I just can’t bear to part with it.” But I’m letting go of feeling like I have to keep everything just because past me once wanted it, and if I’m iffy on something, rather than keeping it “just in case,” I’m going to take my uncertainty to mean that I don’t need it right now, and if it’s meant to return to my life in some form, it will.

Platt founded the #1Thing1Day1Year decluttering challenge, which you can learn more about here, and I encourage you to follow her on Instagram. The challenge is exactly what it sounds like, a method of slow decluttering that’s, as she wrote in January 2024, “an opportunity for us to get in the habit of letting go of things that no longer serve us using a low-pressure, holistic approach.”

I like this approach, and am documenting each item the way I am, because these are items I’ve actually had to pause and ponder whether to keep or not. I’m not putting one random hair tie covered in dust on the list because there’s no brainpower required for that decision. Everything on my list will either have been personally meaningful to me or caused me to debate internally about its role in my life. I hope the answers to those debates will help guide me forward into the next stage of whoever I’m meant to be.

I’m not following any specific rules, but I’m leaning toward the “no touch, no thought” method advocated by Leslie Corona at Real Simple, where you ask yourself whether you’ve touched the item in the last year or even thought about the item in the last year.

The problem with my hoarder brain is that even if my answer to both of those is no, my mind will come up with reasons why it’s actually a good thing I rediscovered the item, to remind me to start using it. Which would be great, if I actually used it, like I did with my “just keep writing” t shirt that’s now too big on me but is so soft and slouchy and special because I wore it right after my miscarriage in January 2021.

It’s very easy for me to convince myself that now that I know an item is available to me, I will suddenly find a renewed zeal for it, or use it for a new purpose, or give it to a friend, or…cue an endless series of uses I could find for it rather than, the worst solution of all, throwing it out.

But sometimes, I do need to throw things out or give them away, in order to make room. I almost wrote, “room for new things,” but that’s exactly the problem. I want to see what life is like with more open space, with a desk whose sleek wooden surface I can see and run my hand over. I want to let my 1-year-old roam around in my room and not be worried she’s going to find something she shouldn’t be playing with (then again, this is a tall order since this morning she put a postcard from our recent vacation in her mouth).

What I’m doing is trying to take one forward motion every day with this project, which I hope will also inspire me to keep moving ahead with my other projects, even when they feel impossible. Because one of my worst traits is that if everything doesn’t go perfectly for me right off the bat, I give up. And I don’t want to give up on this because I want to be able to see the change in my everyday surroundings and look through my year of photos and list and posts feel proud that I’ve been proactive about my purging. Already, in the three months I’ve been contemplating doing it, this project has impacted what I purchase because I don’t want to buy something now and just get rid of it in a few months (unless it’s something I bought with that intention).

I want to not overthink each item, because with 365, they aren’t all going to be gigantic, meaningful things. Some may be small, but cumulatively, they will have an impact.

Speaking of overthinking…I’ve started this post in my head dozens of times over the last few months, and am determined that this afternoon—not because September 16 has any special resonance for me, but only because I want to start the ball rolling—I’m going to actually finish it.

I’ve been reading a chapter a day of Oliver Burkeman’s book Meditations for Mortals, about how embracing the fact that life is finite can actually help us, as the subtitle says, “embrace your limitations and make time for what counts.” I can’t do everything I want to do every day, especially with limited childcare and other priorities that often supersede my creative plans, but I want to do something that fills me with pride every day besides being a mom.

Yesterday I read in Burkeman’s book:

Perfectionists love to begin new endeavors, because the moment of starting belongs to the world of limitlessness: for as long as you haven’t done any work on a project, it’s still possible to believe that the end result might match the ideal in your mind. You can luxuriate in the feeling of pure potential; it’s like opening the curtains, one weekend morning in childhood to find the streets and gardens blanketed in virgin snow.

This passage resonated with me, because that’s always been my m.o., and in whatever remaining decades I have, I want to try a new way of operating. So rather than trying to make this post perfect, or have my entire next week of items already lined up, I’m forging ahead, trusting that I will make this a priority every day, even if I don’t get to it until after my daughter’s bedtime.

As I’ve been reading Burkeman’s book, I’ve been thinking about what I feel genuinely pained about ignoring, and this project is one of those things. So I’m starting, and I’m doing it in a way that I hope will be manageable for me so that I can actually stick with it. Once a day, I can find something to give away or throw out, spurring me on to both know that I can commit to a task, and that I can make room in my physical surroundings and my mind for whatever comes next.

the typo on this stamp isn’t the reason I’m getting rid of it

The first item I’m formally getting rid of is this “From the Library of” stamp that Drew got me so long ago I can’t even pinpoint exactly what year. First of all, there’s a typo: It says “From the desk of Rachel Kramer Brussel,” when my last name is Bussel.

But that’s really just a surface reason. The truth is I don’t actually want to stamp my books, even though I do sometimes lend them to friends. I’m okay with trusting they’ll come back to me, and I’m also thinking about down the road, if we ever move, or after I’m dead, I don’t need my books to have my name in them. That actually feels a little weird and presumptuous.

I like the idea of them moving on to new homes having some of my spirit imbued in them from my fingerprints, from what I absorbed while I read them, or, if I didn’t get to them, from my intentions to read them. I hope that whatever echoes of myself I leave on my books are ones that linger on but that don’t need to be so obvious as to have my name (or a version of it) on them.

Getting rid of a personalized gift feels rude, but knowing that my minimalist boyfriend is well aware that I haven’t been using it, I know he’d approve of this being my first pick.

I’m not trying to influence anyone else to declutter, but I hope that you’ll follow along and maybe learn a little about what’s meaningful to me.

And if you’re interested in the general topic of stuff, stay tuned for my upcoming podcast (one of those projects I mentioned above!) and check out the Stuff-ed and Object-ives sections of my personal essay magazine Open Secrets.

The best way to support my work is to subscribe to Open Secrets Magazine, where every week I edit deeply personal essays by authors from around the world. Paid subscriptions there go directly to paying authors and are appreciated, but I’m mainly focused on reaching new subscribers.