My clothing was the hardest thing to downsize. Since I was a teenager, I have been shopping for clothes in op shops, charity stores and vintage markets, and these treasure hunt finds make up 90% of my wardrobe. Furniture that is easy to move and easy to sell won, which is an unfortunate symbol of the state of the housing market in Australia for my generation. My younger self was one of the few millennials keeping the antique furniture industry alive instead of killing it off, but the reality of moving from one unstable rental property to the next ruined any joy in owning beautifully crafted, old, heavy things. The immovable brown furniture of my youth was replaced by light, easily dismantled flat-pack IKEA, which proved amazingly easy to sell when I started downsizing in preparation for moving overseas. In my sobriety I was happy to let go of that tie to my previous life, but discovered that heavy, dark brown furniture is almost impossible to pass on, even for free. I lived in that flat for nearly 10 years, and when it came time to move I was no longer drinking. I finally found one on eBay that fit my tiny budget, and roped in a few friends to help carry the huge, heavy beast up to my second floor flat. In my mid-20s I was obsessed with modelling my life after black and white movies, and coveted a classic, dark wood cocktail cabinet that opened to reveal sparkling mirrors, delicate glasses and bottles of exotic spirits. It allowed me to see minimalism as a philosophy for living with more intention, and not just some kind of capsule wardrobe or home decor trend. I found the book Love People, Use Things: Because the Opposite Never Works particularly helpful for letting go. The process was not easy, and despite an overall sense of liberation I have still cried several times, homesick for our old rental house and the things we had around us to bring warmth and comfort. We ended up selling, donating or recycling about 90% of our worldly goods, and are currently in Brno with a double bass and a handful of clothes between us, the rest of our belongings packed away in a few boxes back in Australia. We blocked out our calendars from July 2022 onwards, and began the enormous task of reducing our possessions down to the absolute bare minimum. Those two years gave my husband and I time to think about our lives in Melbourne, and we decided we wanted to spend some time living in the Czech Republic where he was born.
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