Skip to main content

a colour-crazed maximalist ventures into minimalism


I, Louise Kate Vivian,  am a maximalist. If you don't believe me, you should see my room. Admittedly, I did live away from my home for three years (for uni) and there accumulated a ton of stuff, a veritable ton. However, as 2018 fast approaches, I have decided to minimise my oh-so-maximalist lifestyle: the compulsive clothes-purchasing has to stop, and I highly doubt I need to read every single one of the three hundred books that lay in (untidy, though organised) stacks on my desk. Having so many material possessions is tiring, stressful and weighing heavily on my mind. I thirst for a clear space, a life and personality independent of consumerist-induced vanity, and a focus on experiencing all (or at least some) of what life has to offer. It's time to wave goodbye to the ton of stuff, and welcome a greatly improved financial situation and a greatly reduced quota of time allotted to tidying my currently untameable room.


Where to start? Or more to the point: how to start?

I did some research: I watched video-variants of 'How to Build a Capsule Wardrobe,' 'How to Become a Minimalist' and 'The Mari-Kondo method,' but they were of little help to me. I understand the concept of a capsule wardrobe: a small selection of pieces that represent your personality and style for each season, and yet while primarily desirable, the whole idea of limiting choice is unnatural to me. I'm a different person every day, I love to experiment, I want to be able to adopt a new identity with each fresh outfit. This leads me to come back to a question I desperately try to evade: who is Louise Kate Vivian? And moreover, who could she be?

I have a vague idea about my style: quirky and colourful. However, during my quest for information, I realised that virtually everyone on the Internet that has successfully adopted the minimalist wardrobe ideal (and even lifestyle) has an exceptionally monochromatic palette. Even those with an infusion of colour appear too simplistic for my taste. 'Crazy' and 'Loud' are two words I place value upon (though this is not to say I don't dress plainly myself sometimes, and that I don't enjoy the minimalist aesthetic, it is rather to make the claim that I am almost certainly incapable of dressing in that way).



And so this leads me onto why I'm writing this post and why I intend to record my journey into minimalist maximalism: there doesn't seem to be any content (that I can find, if you know of any, please point me in the right direction) or bloggers or vloggers documenting such a feat.


I will venture where no self-proclaimed maximalist has gone before. 2018 is the year of minimalist maximalism. I am unafraid (okay, a little afraid) to do so and to let you lot see my successes, my failings and my somewhere-inbetweens.


All the photos in the post by the way are pre-minimalist-clear-out evidence (heavily tidied, mind you), so let's hope the next year or so will bring about a positive change with preferably more successes than failings.

Over and out folks, thanks for reading, let the purge begin!

Instagram: @jumper.dweller




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not-Dinner-Party-Appropriate: anecdotes from the mental hospital

 I feel like a time traveller. I've awoken in 2021, sleeping through a pandemic and my teenage years, now in my mid-twenties. I have no dinner-party-appropriate anecdotes. Only mental ill-health with bouts of questionable wellness. I have been in four different mental hospitals, which I predict could be four more than most people. No one talks about it, including me. Like, at all.  Whenever someone talks about mental illness, there is this most impenetrable silence, followed by: 'I knew someone who was depressed once.' Or a casual, almost nonchalant change of subject. I mean, we talk about mental health a lot - how to keep it afloat, how to do 'self-care' in a commercially-assisted sense. It's all body butters and face masks.  I don't like it when people reduce preventing mental illness down to looking after yourself or not. That is a large part of it, a whole team of people looked after me at my worst. Most things cannot be made better with a face mask.  It...
3 comments
Read more

Imposters: a story about a Capgras delusion

  It's cold. I'm always so cold. My hands quiver blue and wrists bloom purple, after days of bang, bang, banging my wrist on the arm of my chair. I don't think I'm okay, but I don't think I'm not okay either. I think, I think, I think I'm breaking. I am on the children's ward. I have not seen my real parents for months. Some strange people visit sometimes. I hide from them. They are not my parents. They are often nice and I begin to trust them, then they'll do something off-kilter and I shy away again, like a beaten dog.  I had climbed out of a window, bawled through the lane outside the house and taken solace at a friend's home up the road. Gently I was led back to my childhood home and bundled into the car, driven to the hospital and admitted in hopes of finding a way to avoid another inpatient admission. We couldn't find one.  I arrive at the unit, brittle. Last time I was in this position, I had a home, but now I'm adrift. My parents ...
2 comments
Read more

Section three - a mental hospital anecdote

  There is so much that I can't tell you about my third admission, so much I can't remember. Illness blurs the details and the privacy I owe to my friends erases the daily minutiae of the unit. In short, I had been sectioned - section three, six months. A treatment order, that in retrospect, could probably have been avoided. Or maybe that is just what I like to tell myself when I think about it late at night.  I had found myself in a field, shivering in the early evening sun. It was July, I was in love, but still very, very ill. I had been taken on four occasions to our local accident and emergency department that week. I was, as I read later in my unit-admission report, 'no longer manageable in the community'. I was sad, but determined. I was determined to make an exit any way I could. Instead I was flown to Woking, heavily sedated - so much so that I have no memory of the journey there and was deemed 'unresponsive' in my admission interview.  I digress. So man...
Post a Comment
Read more