As many of you have likely experienced, I am broke.
Not dead-broke. I have a little in savings, I have a 5 figure limit on my credit card I’m nowhere near, I pay my rent and bills on time. I have friends with cool jobs able to hook me up with cool free things. I’m still over here living. Just…frugally.
So I’ve started looking into downsizing my life.
I know that at the end of my current lease, I have to move out. I don’t want to be house poor any longer, and this one bedroom with rent increasing each year is no longer sustainable for me. I know I’m preparing for a move, just to where has not been decided yet. I look around my apartment, the things I’ve accumulated over the past 3 years, and I feel stressed.
Enter Marie Kondo.
Actually, scratch that.
Re-enter Elle Fowler.
Elle, better known by the moniker AllThatGlitters21, was everything to me when I was 15 years old. Her, and her sister Blair. I religiously watched their Youtube videos when they came out – they taught me the beginnings of most everything I know about makeup, fashion, and home decor. You will find my apartment has HEAVY inspiration from their early room tours – from my IKEA Alex 9 Drawer (Elle had those), to my Office Depot 10 drawer organizer (Blair had those). I still carry around a Lily Pulitzer planner everywhere I go, which they used to sell on their iconic Glitzy Glam shop.
Elle took a bit of a break from social media to do adult things like get married, birth an adorable son, and open her own planner shop. No one can blame her for that. But she’s back, and she’s DECLUTTERING, darling.
I was once the declutter queen in college. I went from holding onto everything my entire childhood because I “might need it again someday” – likely due to some residual feelings unresolved childhood trauma – to the queen of getting rid of absolutely everything in college – likely due to my desire to start anew. I never held onto anything that wasn’t immediately useful to me, or things that didn’t make me feel happy. I also moved frequently – I had 6 dorms/apartments in my 3.5 year time. I didn’t have time to hold onto clutter.
Somehow in staying in the same spot for 3 years, I’ve regressed.
The KonMari method, the same one Elle has been using and tagging in her recent videos, is simple when you break it down. If it doesn’t bring use or spark joy, dump it. I SWEAR I was using this method before she branded it with her name, but I fell off the wagon.
So…let’s start the journey of watching me go from a hoarder den to the capsule wardrobe, perfectly organized queen I was.
I was that girl once – I know I can be her again.
Corinne DeCost 