Over the past few months, I have been dabbling into the world of minimalism, or trying to live a more decluttered lifestyle, as best described by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus on their website, "The Minimalists". I, like most middle-class Americans, have a lot of "stuff", anything from clothes, and shoes, to stuffed animals and decorations, to books, DVDs.

When I was younger, I was a collector- I liked to look at my collection of snow globes on my shelf, despite not having an actual use for them, and I was proud of my ever-expanding forrest of stuffed animals, though some I hadn't even looked at in years. I saw my material items as things that had to be gathered to improve my life and when my storage space got too small, I just had to do some reorganization and there, problem solved.

I discovered, however, during the winter break after my first semester in college that the problem, in fact, was not solved.

I remember it was a few days after Christmas and I was trying to find places to store the gifts I had gotten. They mostly consisted of clothes and a few books, but as I shuffled around my bookshelf and forced more hangers into my closet, I felt my stomach turn. I couldn't possibly continue to keep shoving new items into small spaces without getting rid of old items first. I even felt a twinge of guilt at the realization that I had been placing so much emphasis on simply collecting material objects to occupy space instead of using them to their worth.

I remember then sitting on the edge of my bed, unable to sway my fixation on all of my "stuff". That's all it was, "stuff" that I had somehow convinced myself that I absolutely needed to survive. Now instead of feeling comforted by the mountain of stuffed animals in my closet, I was haunted.

I suppose I have always been very sentimental. Every trinket that had ever been gifted to me, every notebook, every birthday card, I always felt guilty or sad when I tried to throw something out or give something away. I was confusing material items for non-material feelings, somehow convinced that if I lost one than I would no longer have the other. Clearly, I had been conditioned by a society that so carefully emphasizes the importance of material goods into this incorrect line of thinking.

So now, even though I'm still far from considering myself to be a true minimalist because I still do love my collection of t-shirts that are actually being worn and I can't quite bring myself to sort through my beloved books just yet, but I'm getting there. Every break that I have from school, either in the summer or winter, I make sure to set aside a few days to go through what I have and evaluate how much I really "need" these items. I make a whole day of it and turn on my favorite Spotify playlists, treating myself to a little piece of mind.

It can be difficult throwing away stuffed animals that I used to spend hours playing with, so while I've still got a long way to go, it's teaching me how to prioritize what's really important in life. Not the material possessions themselves, but the good times and people that I associate with them can live on in my brain space instead.