The things you own end up owning you

Or something like that

For the last six months I’ve been living on less than half of my closet. When I left my studio apartment in Greenwich Village and moved into my boyfriend's room in a shared 3-bed loft with limited closet space, there was really no other option. Some items I packed up in boxes and stacked neatly in the corner of a storage unit. Others I folded into suitcases which I stashed at my aunt’s apartment uptown. I kept with me as much as I thought I could squeeze into our shared closet and tried to choose wisely.

I assumed I would feel sorely out of options– forced to rewear the same clothes and outfits, unable to try on endless different variations when I was feeling stuck. But that hasn’t been the case. There have been maybe five particular items of clothing I’ve thought about or actively missed over the last six months, but the others have been largely if not completely forgotten.

This past week, I’ve been downsizing again as I prepare to leave on an extended trip. Uptown at my aunts, I sorted through clothes with the intention of donating the large majority of what I’d left there, but was quickly stymied. I picked up a beautiful, color-dappled sheer blouse that I’d forgotten existed and hadn’t worn in years and probably would not have worn even had it been downtown in my everyday wardrobe drawers– but looking at it again, holding its delicate fabric between my fingers I just liked it. And I’d spent money on it. And I could imagine a day or two in the far-off future where I might be inclined to wear it again. Was that enough to merit keeping it?

Later that night at dinner, I explained the conundrum to my boyfriend, Giulio. “What do you do with something like that?” I asked, “To keep or not to keep?”

“I guess,” Giulio said, “it depends how much space you have.” And then he quoted a favorite line from Fight Club. “The things you own end up owning you.”

When Giulio has quoted this line in the past I’ve rolled my eyes and laughed, quick to jump into a debate about why certain things are actually more than just byproducts of our capitalist hyper-consumer centric society. But lately, I’ve started to think that he might be right. In addition to my lack of clothes, I’ve also spent the last six months without basically all of my things. Some were given away when I left my apartment, and the rest were packed up and left in my storage unit.

When I went to add a load of winter gear to storage yesterday (spring is, in fact coming), I opened up some of the boxes there, curious about all the things I’d forgotten to remember. It was like visiting old friends. Here was the pudgy handmade vase I’d bought at a makers fair in Virginia, with a mouth only big enough to hold one or two dried stalks of eucalyptus. Here were my favorite olive-embroidered napkins, my grandmother’s Italian serving platter, the gold candlesticks I’d gotten for almost nothing at a store clear-out sale. There were my favorite pieces of art, my notebooks and letters, coats and delicate heels and vintage light fixtures that didn’t work, and lots and lots of books.

Holding each item again, I felt true affection for them. My heart swelled in its cage, remembering the time in my life each one came from, the spots they’d held in my old apartment; the center of my life in the city for years. I could recall exactly where each thing had been kept in my small studio, how I’d sit on my couch sometimes and just look at the shelves, feeling comforted and enlivened by the aged book spines and tchotchkes and photos contained there.

I’d thought, when I first had a place of my own, that my things contributed to a feeling of safety and “homeness”… that collecting and arranging items was part of a nest-making instinct; an attempt to carve out a space for myself in a wholly unfamiliar and overwhelming city. And in some ways, it certainly was. But now, at Giulio’s apartment, where the books on the shelves are not my books, and the knick-knacks don’t hold my memories and the art is not meaningful to me, do I really feel any less at home? In this case, perhaps the cliche is true – that sometimes home is a person, not a place (and certainly not a collection of things).

I still love my things. I won’t be giving them all away any time soon. I look forward to unpacking them, one day, in a proper house of our own with bookshelves and ample storage space and lots of light. But being without my stuff has proved how little it truly matters in the end. Life without them has been pretty much the exact same as life with them– and maybe even better– because it’s also allowed me the freedom to embark on the nomadic six months I have ahead of me.

I am, in my heart, a homebody. I know I won’t last without a space of my own for too long. But I figure if there’s ever a time to push that limit it’s now. And it’s easier to do so knowing that that space– a cozy room with all my books and a table for collaging and lush plants draped over wooden shelves – doesn’t exist somewhere. It’s not waiting for me at the end of my journey, beckoning me back, urging me to stay. That space exists only in the unknown future beyond now, when I make the intentional decision to create it again. Until then, it is a figment of my imagination.

I have more thoughts on things but no time to write them today as I’m off to catch a flight. So take this clip from UP (my favorite animated movie of all time) as a brief summary:

It’s just a house.