Letting go of 99% of our stuff, and the American Dream.
Leading up to our move to Costa Rica, one of the most mentally and emotionally challenging aspects for me was getting rid of 99.9% of our stuff. It felt like an insurmountable task for someone who has never seen a Goodwill mug she wasn't emotionally attached to
I had to decide: could I actually let go of the Stuff (with a capital S) that I had been allowing to define me for my entire adult life? I had fallen so hard for the capitalistic "American Dream". The nice car didn't make you happy? Buy a nicer one. Your nice home didn't make you happy? Find a better one. Not enough room to fit all of those nice things? Buy a bigger one. Any problem I had, Amazon had a product to sell me as the solution. And I had a lot of problems!
I hadn't realized that I was equating having nice things to my worth as an individual. Somewhere deep down I thought that if I had a nice enough house/car/clothes that people would think better of me. But why did I care? It was only causing me suffering and anxiety.
It got to the point where I was spending my days enslaved to my Stuff. Once we had kids it was game over. I spent nearly every waking moment overwhelmed by the clutter. I was a stay at home mom with a full time nanny because I needed help just managing the Stuff. Not to mention how hard Dan was working to pay for this lifestyle I had "dreamed of" that we were now slowly realizing was actually making us unhappy.
We moved to Costa Rica with 7 suitcases for a family of 4. I have learned that I can make do with SO much less than I could have ever imagined. I drive the kids to school in a 1998 Honda CRV with 180,000 miles and I don't worry what the other parents think, because my car has absolutely nothing to do with who I am as an individual. We come home to a 900 sq ft condo that takes me an hour to clean on a messy day. Dan has more time to spend time with his kids and enjoy his life. My kids toys now fit in three baskets, and they haven't batted an eye! Because now I actually have the time and mental bandwidth to spend with them instead of constantly cleaning up more Stuff.
