Every August, the world remembers to tell us to simplify. It has a whole week for it now, and I understand the appeal. There is real tenderness in any invitation to put things down.
But I’ve come to be wary of the kind of simplifying that arrives with a shopping list. The matching baskets. The label maker. The thirty-day challenge that ends with a neater closet and the same tired heart. That version treats a full life like a cluttered drawer — as though the problem were only ever the number of things, and never the quiet ache of holding what was never yours to hold.
Because here is what I don’t often admit: for years, I was very good at simplifying. I just called it something else.
I called it keeping the peace. I called it not making a fuss. I took my own wanting and folded it into smaller and smaller squares, tucked somewhere I wouldn’t have to look. I simplified my life the way you simplify a sentence by removing the subject — until what was left was tidy, and agreeable, and easy for everyone else to carry. Easy to overlook. I mistook disappearing for order. I thought a life with less of *me* in it was a life with less trouble in it.
It is a strange grief, to realize how skilled you became at your own vanishing.
So when I read the cheerful reminders to pare down and let go, some part of me flinches because I already know how to let go of the wrong things. I have donated the wrong boxes. I have cleared the wrong shelves. The clutter that actually weighed the most was never on any surface I could wipe down. It was the roles I said yes to before anyone finished asking. The apologies I offered for taking up space. The endless low hum of managing how I might be received.
That is the simplifying no one sells you, because there is nothing to buy. No one profits from a woman who stops performing her own smallness.
I don’t think simplifying means having less. I’ve come to think it means carrying less that isn’t yours. There’s a difference, and it took me most of my life to feel it. A drawer can be spare and a life still be crowded — crowded with obligations you inherited, expectations you never agreed to, a version of yourself assembled mostly to keep other people comfortable.
The morning I understood this, nothing on my shelves changed. I didn’t throw anything away. I simply stopped folding one particular longing into its small, hidden square, and let it sit out in the open where I could see it. That was all. It felt less like de-cluttering and more like coming home to a house I’d been living beside for years.
So if this is the week you’re meant to simplify, I won’t hand you a method. You have surely been handed enough of those. I’ll only say this, quietly, the way you’d say it to someone you loved: you are allowed to keep what is yours. You are allowed to stop carrying the rest. And the emptiest, most spacious thing you will ever make room for is your own honest life, unfolded at last, taking up exactly as much room as it needs.