Friday, June 21, 2013

Challenge Accepted!

Here I am 2 weeks after my initial blog post and that first post was a long time in the making because of my fear surrounding putting myself out there in blog form and then I did it and I didn't find it so bad. It was slightly scary but I love my friends and family because they have been super supportive and that helps a lot.

This week I would like to talk about a personal challenge to myself to become more of a minimalist. This includes living with less, pairing down the stuff I have and fighting the urge to accumulate more. I have been reading the signs from the universe and she has been very clear in illustrating that I need to stop shopping and stop spending my money recklessly. These signs have come in the form of me continually losing and/or breaking many of my things lately.

With inspiration and help from my best friend over at the Sarcastic Bystander,I have already paired down my closet. I donated, repurposed and/or threw-out about 170 pieces of clothing that I no longer wear or are inappropriate for various reasons including being worn out, wrong size, etc. I donated most of the pieces to Value Village and threw out anything that was too far gone. Here is a handy visual of all the clothes I purged from my closet:

                                                                        Picture used with permission from http://www.sarcasticbystander.com/

Before my closet demolition, I also helped her purge her closet in her quest to live a more healthy and minimalist life. Check out her purge I helped with!
We have also embarked on a challenge to not buy any more clothing for the rest of the summer. So far I have stuck to this challenge fairly well (minus a slip or 2). So in that vain and with inspiration from my best friend and her healthy lifestyle I am going to set myself an additional summer challenge.

The Summer Purge of 2013 (as I have so named it) will include the following:
  • In addition to buying no more clothing for the summer, I also commit to not buying any more accessories and purging the accessories I do have;
  • Purging of my books and bookshelf, including finishing the numerous books I have started and getting rid of those University textbooks I will never touch again;
  • Organizing and purging all the 'stuff' I have stored at my parents that I hope to use once I move out; and
  • I am a paper and sticker hoarder, so I think it is time to use, sell, donate & purge a lot of that stuff as well.
So this is my challenge to myself and one thing that has always been hard for me in sticking to challenges and commitments I make to myself is the follow-through. I can talk myself into or out of anything and I am great with the excuses. I hope that this public commitment to the challenge will help motivate me better than I've been able to motivate myself so far. I know a lot of you can relate to this so please help me out and keep me accountable. This will be the first of many challenges I set for myself that I will share with you that will hopefully lead to a healthier, happier and uncommon life. Challenge Accepted! :) 



No comments:

Post a Comment