Culture

I WANT MY LIFE BACK

I stopped being myself in 2013. When I was talked into moving back to Oklahoma by Mom & Dad, I didn’t know I would do so at the cost of myself, but as I settled in to my new life in Stillwater & Glencoe, I disconnected from the activities and the people I love. I didn’t even realize I was doing that. This was caused a series of choices I made, and a series of inactions on my part. There was plenty of opportunity to find a path in Stillwater, at least at the start, but I was hung up on resentment and frustration. I found it so difficult to accept where I was. I did blame my parents for a while, but they didn’t force me to move. The didn’t fly up to Alaska and stuff me in a plane. They convinced me over time, and ultimately I chose to return. Partly, it was to help Mom & Dad, who had both been dealing with increasingly difficult medical situations, but also I wanted to be back to spend time with my niblings before they got too old. I dreaded being the uncle who they had no connection with because I was so far away, only to see them rarely in adulthood. I wanted to be there for their childhoods.

In the Summer of 2013, freshly moved back, I had my own apartment with Molly & Franz. It was upstairs from Brad, Conner & Jason, which was nice. Mom & Dad needed limited help, mostly with chores around the property and going with them to appointment and sometimes grocery shopping. Honestly, at first I felt duped. They didn’t need much from me, and that allowed me to start a business making a selling artwork, as well as art & craft supplies. And that was going pretty well. It wasn’t initially very profitable, but it was nice to have something to do that was creative and belonged to me. That lasted from June to August when things were disrupted slightly.

Justin, my good friend from Tulsa, called out of the blue one day in August. He knew I was back in Oklahoma, but we hadn’t seen one another yet. His sister had decided she needed the space in her house for her family, and Justin was in her way. She had offered to take him to a homeless shelter, and he needed a place to stay. Justin deals with some mental health issues and therefore cannot work, would be unable to find his own apartment, and isn’t even allowed to control his own money. Taking him somewhere like a shelter is just going to make his life infinitely more difficult. I do think it is fair that she wanted the space for her family. They lived in a modestly sized house with a family of seven people. It was crowded. However, it will never not baffle me that she wanted to take Justin to a shelter rather than help him find an apartment. She had been Justin’s representative payee while I was in Alaska, and I know she hated doing it. But there are people who do that as a job who could have taken over and helped. She did need to be involved in that transition. But she preferred the easiest way for her. Of course Justin could come stay with me. It wasn’t even really a question. He’s always been welcome.

Justin’s presence changed things in a couple of ways. First, I lost the separation between my home office and my bedroom. As much as I tried, it was such a small space that I never could maintain things as well as they had started and my new business struggled as a result. Secondly, Justin requires time and attention. He requires much more than most people, and at the time he had some other struggles that would cause him to absolutely demand attention, waking me up in the middle of the night to reassure him, or calling me to praise him. I’ve never been particularly bothered by these aspects of Justin’s personality, but it can be draining to deal with. My life became about him and my parents quickly, and I was okay with that. I didn’t even really notice I was doing it, but I was giving myself away in small bits.

INTO THE FIRE

My parents built their house in 2015, and I moved to the mobile home where they had been living. That was really nice. There was a bedroom on either end, so it was perfect to share with Justin. And it was spacious. I liked the mobile home, but there had been plans to build a home office. That never happened, and over time talks of that faded as my parents’ needs increased. Meanwhile, my house never got put together and the rooms started to fill up with my intentions and plans, boxes of products I would use in a better situation. My parents property was a twenty acre lot north of Stillwater on a gravel road. It was just far away enough to feel remote, but close enough to go to town frequently. And the property was perfect, completely surrounded by trees except for a natural clearing of about five acres where the mobile home sat and where the house was built. The mornings were frequented by birds, squirrels, deer, and armadillos. Other occasional visitors were rabbits, turkeys, bobcats, opossums, raccoons, coyotes, foxes, guinea fowl, bats, stray cats, stray dogs, the list goes on and on…. I loved that. But I had become so married to my own resentment that the years would go on and I would not.

Mom died in 2018. I hadn’t unpacked my house. And I spent a year barely even leaving my bed after that. And Dad became increasingly in need of care, prompting Justin to spend most of his time being nearby to help Dad if needed. I was allowed to start trying to put myself together. I started another company in 2019, made friends online, started a career. It was great, but around me were the reminders of my failure. But that was changing. I was feeling like it was going to start getting together. I started finally putting my house together in 2020, if not pleased with my situation, at least resigned. But I had gained a lot of weight. I didn’t even realize how out of control my weight had become, but I was having trouble standing or walking. When I took Dad to get his COVID shot, I was in so much pain from standing in line that I genuinely almost needed medical attention. I was getting my company going, but I was getting nowhere physically. And what I started on my house stalled quickly. The bed frame for Justin’s room was never opened. Many things I had purchased, furniture and sheets and curtains, remained in their packages for the rest of my time there. The house would never be unpacked. And in 2022, Dad was diagnosed with cancer. Everything stopped and my life became about that until January 2023 when Dad died.

THE HOARD

When Dad died, I was confronted with the massive quantities of stuff he had amassed. Dad was a hoarder. That term gets thrown around a lot to refer to untidy homes or houses with a few too many items of one type or another. That isn’t hoarding. Hoarding is a stack of empty insulated cardboard boxes in the corner of a bedroom that went all the way to the ceiling. Hoarding is a once beautiful velvet sofa covered in raccoon droppings and rat urine because it was too precious for people to use and it was better to put the sofa in the shed. Hoarding is long-expired food that nobody is allowed to throw away from the refrigerator or pantry. Hoarding is frequent trips to Goodwill for random dishes, Halloween decor, dolls, etc. Dad had built a farm shed, a 20’x60’ metal building that he quickly filled with his finds. By the time I moved out there, the shed was pretty packed with stuff, a lot of it mine from Tulsa, but also some of my brothers’ and niblings’ stuff. Most was Dads. Very, very little was Mom’s. But it was still navigable in 2013. By 2015, it required some work to organize it, which I did. But as life spiraled, things got worse and Dad would add things up until about 2020. The building became so packed with stuff that you couldn’t get around anymore. Sometime after that, raccoons started living in there and eventually everything would be covered in droppings.

In August 2023, after months of waiting for my brothers to help with clearing things out, I decided I need to lose weight so I could get things done myself. I needed to clear the hoard completely, but it was such a daunting task. That would start with dieting.

In October, we hired a family friend and her husband to start the process of emptying the shed. They made a lot of progress, but it took many hours of work by myself and Justin to go through everything and determine what needed to be tossed and what should be kept. While I didn’t intend to keep much, I knew there would be a few things I wasn’t prepared to sort out as trash. We had a decent system. They would drag all the stuff out onto a tarp in the yard and I would spend the next two weeks going through box by box, which I did. I was initially resentful of even that because I was doing it alone, but I got to relive a lot of memories in that process.

Hoarding is boxes that contain both stacks of old junk mail, washed fast food containers, and family photos. Hoarding a photo album covered in dust and urine. Hoarding is a missing wedding ring supposedly in a hollowed piece of wood, somewhere in a box in an enormous warehouse of a shed, never to be located.

I wasn’t properly warned about decision fatigue. I didn’t even know it was a thing until I was well into sorting through our lives and felt so drained I couldn’t even get out of bed. It’s draining. And while I love that I got to do it, neither of my brothers ever really did show up to assist. They actually have no idea what it took to do that job, how after a few hours you wouldn’t know how to separate a receipt from 1992 from an oil painting by a grandparent. Everything would devolve into “I better just save this, I can’t figure out what to do.” And then I needed a break for a couple of days. It was overwhelming.

When the decisions in the shed were done, we started making decisions in the house. The cabinets were stuffed with dishes, the closets with linens. My brother had someone take all of the clothes, which was both good and bad. I later learned that Dad had kept the jacket his dad was wearing when he died, and that he kept in hung in the closet. I never knew that; it was written in a letter to someone else. And it got swept into a bag, carted off to Goodwill. That feels like a regret, but ultimately it is both just a jacket and one I didn’t know anything about. He had kept it hanging with his clothes from 1975, but he didn’t share that memory. He hadn’t shown the jacket to his children. With the rest of the house, I made quick and sometimes harsh decisions. My time in the shed had seasoned me, hardened me. I threw out things I should have kept, but I couldn’t keep the energy up for doing that work. We needed to empty the house to sell it.

CHANGED BY CIRCUMSTANCE

I’m a different person after that experience. By the time we listed the house, I had lost 160lb. I had vowed to never keep anything. I had filled up two storage units with stuff that I kept because that vow was not as strong as it could have been. And I moved on to dealing with my house, largely unpacked since 2015. I didn’t have as much of an emotional response to my own house as I did to my parents’ house and shed. I had accepted my failures by that point and just sorted through things as quickly as I could, discarding or saving unopened boxes of things I had looked forward to enjoying. I had a frame hung up that still had the original paper insert, boxes of clothes from Alaska, and several appliances that I had purchased with good intentions, but which never even got opened once to check and make sure they weren’t broken. I started my house meticulously organized, but by the end I was shoveling things into boxes and shoving them in the the nooks & crannies of the storage unit. The third one, just housing things from my own place.

I purchased my own house in July 2025. I didn’t have time to shop for the specific this or that to make it perfect. My list of needs was short and as long as I could see myself living in a house, I was almost certainly going to buy it. After a few houses I loved, but for one reason or another wouldn’t work out, I found my house in Guthrie. It’s got the new roof I wanted, the new insulation I required, and the neighborhood is quiet. It’s a 1940s neighborhood, and reminds me of Sayre. The yards are small and the neighbors are all in view, but everyone keeps up with their yards and is generally very friendly. It feels like a safe place to be, and I find a lot of comfort in being in a neighborhood so filled with diversity. I had decision fatigue after years of picking through boxes, so I started my life in Guthrie by setting up simply and doing nothing to get it together.

It’s December. The living room is still full of boxes from moving in. The storage units are largely untouched. I have since had a shed built, but I haven’t put in shelves and really earnestly started to fill the space up. I don’t want to hoard. I need storage, but I don’t want the long term storage that had plagued my parents. I don’t want to amass so much stuff! I worry constantly that I will, that I’ve save too much from my parents, that I will run out of space and have to figure out what to do next. I don’t love the idea of repeating the cycle.

SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY

I’ve been reading books and watching videos on organization and minimalism. Aesthetically, I hate minimalism. I am a maximalist, but a maximalist can sometimes be a hoarder waiting to emerge. I want my house to reflect me, but I need to be cautious. I think there are a lot of principles of minimalism that can really help, and I do think it is a misconception that minimalism necessarily requires one to have nothing. I think it’s more about intention and overconsumption. It’s about reigning in capitalist urge to acquire more of everything.

I decided I needed a year spent reducing. In all of the ways I can. I have gained back some of the lost weight, and I want to lose it. I have amassed too many candles, spices, teas, body sprays, lotions, etc. Things build up quickly. I want to spend 2026 doing two things: not buying much & reducing what I have.

I started by identifying the categories of excess that would make the biggest impact for me, as well as strategies for maintaining some that I am not interested in eliminating, but managing quantities of. The biggest offender is the most recent, body sprays. I got out of hand over the summer. I had gone years without the means to buy things like that for myself and I wanted it all. I have so many now that there is no way I will ever use it all up. It’s on the list, of course. Next was candles. I have been known to use candles, but not as often as I would like. And I acquired Mom’s stash of candles. I had my own going, so it felt like a lot. Once I got them all together, it’s a little less that expected, but it is still a lot. It’s on the list. Spices reproduce; I’m convinced they are multiplying when we aren’t looking. And I use the same handful. Where did the random ones come from? It’s on the list. But I was cautious to not overpromise to myself. I have too many art supplies, paper and canvases. I’m not ready to commit to using those up. It’s not on the list for now. Neither are things that need reduced, but aren’t really consumables: things like DVDs, books, clothes. There is purging to do in all categories and I will add those things in the future, but that’s not where I’m starting.

I know there are many names for doing a reduction challenge, but I’m not actually doing someone else’s challenge per se. I’m working on my own self, my own mind. What I’m doing is a bit more holistic and complete.

In Walden, Thoreau said

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluding that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; …we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon cloud, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous end editable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not found and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it as for them in a rigid economy, a stern and a more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men thing that it is essential the the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not want to get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and night to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven is season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on railroads; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper int he wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were the exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus’ dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is , without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his fam in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, — or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were to parish church itself. Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes up holds up his head and asks, “What’s the news?” as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and the, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe,” — and he read s it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wichita River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

I could go on. Maybe I should. Thoreau was right so much of the time that just posting his own words would be worthwhile. Maybe I should do just that as well. We’ll see.

A MUSEUM OF MY WHIMS

I’m very interested in simplifying. I’m interested in living my life, not curating a museum of my whims. And I would love to give it a try instead of just wishing I could start.

I don’t like the idea of “New Years Resolutions.” They tend to be promises you haven’t been able to keep and so you tie them to the start of the year, knowing full well you aren’t likely to continue with them in perpetuity. I didn’t plan my Project Simplify as a resolution for 2026, and in fact I did a soft start on 1 December 2025. This month has been something of a failure, but I’ve learned some things in that failure.

The Plan

1. Reduce spending. I am going to mark days I spend money & those I do not. Excluding utilities & taxes. The goal is to have as few days as possible where money has been spent… or rather to go as many days at a time as possible without having spent money. That isn’t to say I won’t spend frivolously at all; I know I will. But I don’t need to stop by a store every time I am near one.
2. Use up what I have. I have made a list of the items in specific categories that need to be used up. They are all things I enjoy, so I will want to repurchased when I have used things up, but I have specific criteria for that. For each candle I want to acquire, for example, I have to have used up and discarded three from my stash until I am replacing at one to one. The same ratio applies to spices, lotion, air fresheners, and odd foods. For flavored syrups, I can order a case of 12 after using up 18. And for body sprays, there are two scent exceptions on the list (so I am allowed to buy them), but regardless of how many are used, I cannot buy anymore. Those rules should work for now. I might even increase the spices to 4 out, 1 in. I’ll make a chart that shows what has been “banked” and that should help.
3. Add new categories or revise current ratios monthly. Not everything is going to work as well as I hope, so I would like to revisit monthly to make sure I’m staying on track. And if I have reduced anything fully then I can add a new category from the list of future categories.
4. Travel. Read. Relax.
5. Lose weight. I’ve been struggling to stay on track. I go through binges a lot lately, which has caused a lot of weight gain. I need to recommit myself to the plans that work, the lifestyle that makes me feel best, and to enjoying living in my body.
6. Record everything. It was the secret to losing weight before, and I think it might be the secret to simplifying. Write it down, make charts, make lists. Hoard words, not stuff. Amass ideas, not trash. Collect memories, not memorials.
7. Share my progress. I think writing about this might be helpful. On the one hand, I think who would want to hear about my journey through getting rid of stuff I don’t need. On the other hand, and this is a good reminder for me, journaling is never really about others knowing things. It’s about the telling. It’s good to get out the thoughts, to revisit them, to remember the person I have been through the events of my life, even when they are mundane. And maybe someone will get something out of it as well.

CONCLUSION

I’m looking forward to 2026. I think I can really make some improvements to my life that will set me up for success in the future. I think embracing some of the principles of minimalism, while trying to not lose myself, will be positive.