31 | Decluttering and Divorce with Sade Curry

Aug 30

31 | Decluttering and Divorce with Sade Curry

Today's episode is a conversation with a former client, Sade Curry. Sade is a dating coach and hosts the podcast Dating After Divorce. She invited me to a discussion on her podcast, which turned out to be a beautiful recollection of our work together. Sade dedicated a year to transforming her relationship with clutter, and her results are profound. If anyone wants a fuller testimonial of what it's like to partner with me, this episode is for you!

Sade and I take a deep dive into these key topics during our conversation:

How childhood experiences can influence our relationship with clutter
How divorce can bring grief related to the marital home and its contents
Embracing an approach to organizing that works for you
Learning that "stuff" doesn’t mean anything about you or your self-worth
Letting go of social media’s picture-perfect ideals
Defining your process of keeping something
Making items earn a place in your home
Adopting the mindset of small wins

I hope you enjoy this episode with Sade and learn a bit more about what it's like to work with me!

If you want to hear more from Sade or explore her services, visit her website, www.sadecurry.com. Sade is certified in trauma coaching, feminist coaching, and general life and relationship coaching. Her podcast, Dating After Divorce, empowers women to recover from divorce, create an extraordinary life, and find real love again. So if you are looking for love after divorce, there's no one better than Sade!

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Sade Curry, Relationship Coach, Certified Trauma Recovery Coach, Certified Life Coach School Coach
Website: Sade Curry
Podcast: The Dating After Divorce Podcast
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Checklist: 50 Green Flags Of A Healthy Partner

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Intro: Welcome to a Pleasant Solution, Embracing An Organized Life. I'm your host, certified life coach, professional organizer and home life expert, Amelia Pleasant Kennedy. I help folks permanently eliminate clutter in their homes and lives. On this podcast, we'll go beyond the basics of home organization to talk about why a clutter-free mindset is essential to an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. If you're someone with a to-do list, if you're managing a household and if you're caring for others, this podcast is for you. Let's dive in.
Amelia: Welcome to Episode 31, “Decluttering and Divorce with Sade Curry.” Hey y’all! My guest today is someone truly close to my heart. Before I introduce her, I want to emphasize that when I work with clients, I follow a strict code of ethics around client confidentiality. Creating a safe space is important to me, so as a Coach, I don’t reveal client data publicly. However, my clients are more than welcome to choose to share their experience when working with me.

Sade Curry is one of those clients. She invited me to a conversation on her podcast, “Dating After Divorce” and our conversation turned out to be a beautiful recollection of our work together. Sade dedicated a year to transforming her relationship with clutter and her results are profound. If you’ve ever wanted a fuller testimonial of what it’s like to partner with me in this work, Sade is a shining example. She gave me permission to share our conversation here on my podcast, and I know you’ll enjoy hearing our connection. Here’s a little about her:

Sade Curry is a Dating Coach for Divorced Women and host of the Dating after Divorce podcast. She teaches women how to recover from divorce, create an extraordinary life and find real love again. Sade is certified in trauma coaching, feminist coaching, and general life & relationship coaching. She is happily remarried after her divorce. She and her husband live in St. Louis, Missouri and have a blended family of six children. If you’re looking to find love after divorce, there’s no one better than Sade. Connect with her at sadecurry.com. You’ll also find all her details in the show notes. Please enjoy!
Sade: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Dating After Divorce podcast. Today we are talking about divorce and decluttering, and you'll understand by the time this is done why those two things go together. So I have here on Zoom with me, my one-on-one coach, Amelia Pleasant Kennedy. I know you have to say the whole thing because the Pleasant has to come in there.
Amelia: An essential part.
Sade: It is. Amelia is a certified life coach, professional organizer, Fair Play Facilitator, and CEO of A Pleasant Solution. But I know you as my organizing and decluttering coach, we have worked together for a year to get to this point in my journey and we're going to tell you all about it today so welcome Amelia to the podcast.
Amelia: Thank you so much for having me. And it has been the most delightful year. I have loved every second of it, so thank you. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm a decluttering coach. I'm an organizer and I really feel like there's an internal component to the external clutter that shows up in our lives and I can't wait to talk about that journey and that process with you.
Sade: Yeah, yeah. Amazing. And we knew each other prior to being together in our feminist cohort, but then I think that was the first time we actually connected on a connect call. But we'd been in the same coach circles, same coach certification, and we had the connect call and I was like, as you talked about the work that you did, it was like something that I had always known that I needed, but you articulate it so clearly and I was like, oh yeah, I've got to work with you a hundred percent. So I still remember that moment. I was like, yep, this wasn't in my budget, but I have to do this. So for listeners, just to give you guys context for that moment with me because a lot of what we're going to talk about today is really my journey through decluttering and how it really was a healing journey.
The continuation of my own healing from divorce and my own healing from my childhood experiences, I don't even know where to begin. I should probably start with my basement, but actually, I mean, I'll go back a little bit further. I think my whole life, there has always been this cycle. So in ways that maybe some people would think about like an eating disorder or whatever, it was like things would get messy and then I would clean them up and then things would get messy and then I would clean them. And I think it sounds like it's normal, it's kind of normal for things to get messy and get cleaned up. But what wasn't normal about my experience was how I would then beat myself up about it. So I've basically been beating myself up about not being and I put it in quotes, "tidy" because there really isn't such a thing.
These are all the things I've learned from Amelia now. There's no standard, there's no objective yardstick for all of the things that I had in my brain and that I had been worried about my whole life. So there was that component of just like, when will I get to that place of being tidy, so there was that, just that lifelong component of the thoughts that I had around what it meant to be tidy and neat. My home has always been clean and generally neat and like no one's ever felt like, oh my God, I can't go into her home. But my internal dialogue around it wasn't that. And then there were now incidents that happened in my life that came on top of that. I know some of the things we talked about, I'm going to mention, like, probably three particular incidents that came into play in this journey.
One was that I moved a lot as a child because of my parents’ divorce and other things in school. And that always left me with just a sense of being disjointed with my belongings. I couldn't always trust that my belongings would be there when I came home from boarding school. There was a time my dad moved and tossed a lot of our toys and of course I was a child so I didn't understand and he just stayed with me. Then there was a relative that lived with me for a while and left abruptly on an adventure and left a ton of stuff from their apartment in my basement. So I had this whole apartment of stuff that they promised that they were going to ship out, but never did. So four years later that was still sitting in my basement. And then I had the biggie during my divorce, three years from start to finish, so I moved out of the marital home and then there was pain also around losing my marital home, which you coached me on.
And my ex-husband would not permit myself and the children to pick up our belongings. So for three years, like all of our stuff, we literally left with a car full, like stuff you would take on vacation because I thought we were coming back home when things got safe and we never did. So he would not let us pick up our stuff for three years until the divorce was finalized. And then there was a court order that mandated it and there was like a list of things he had. So like the court split everything in half furniture, all of our clothing and so everything got packed up in this big moving truck. At this point I've been living on my own with the kids for three years.
Everything was new, we had all new things. And so now my basement was full of everything I've just described, so - stuff from my relatives, stuff from my marital home, which was 4,000 square feet. And now I'm living in a much smaller place. So for several years that had just been on my mind, like everything I've just described plus all of my thoughts and the expectation that I would be neat, which is something we can talk about, but maybe you should start there with the socialization, how women are socialized to think about this stuff.
Amelia: Well, I would love to take a step back to something you started with, which was talking about your childhood. Because so many of us as adults, that internal dialogue, that blame, that negativity, “I'm not organized enough.” “I'll never be as productive as I hope,” if “I could or should,” all of that that happens inside of our brain. We don't always associate that to our lifelong journey. That's kind of something I want listeners to know is the state of your home now, the state of your business now, how you work and operate through your life. If you see yourself as disorganized or unproductive, not only can that change, but it has roots in our stories, our upbringing, our lives, and whether it's moving or the childhood home or just the environment that you grew up in. All of those are impactful moments that compound together to create our current reality of how we think we run our homes and work and show up as parents or partners. So yeah, that childhood story, I mean, and inheriting clutter and all of that, it's all intertwined.
Sade: A hundred percent. And I know I had the thought, “I'm not organized.” I mean, I didn't have it in like, it wasn't completely black and white, like oh, I'm a hundred percent not organized, but I didn't pay any attention to the parts where I was organized. And that was something you really called my attention to over and over because I kept forgetting. You'd be like, well, “I think you're more organized than you think.” And then very early, I think the first six months you would say, okay, so what are you doing in this area and in this area and in this area? And I'm like, oh, well yeah, I guess I'm pretty organized. But it was like that, I guess you could say Instagram home and not just, because they are parts of my home that are Instagram. Like there's always parts that are like always what you call it, visit already. But then I wouldn't pay attention to those parts. It was always the parts that were not Instagram worthy that I was thinking about.
Amelia: And that's so normal and natural. I know that you tell your audience, like the red flags are really obvious when you're looking for a partner or when you're dating. But we want to point our brain towards the green flags, the things that are really good about someone and the things that are working. But it's a conscious shift that you have to make to look for the ways in which you're organized or productive or just that things are working in your life for sure.
Sade: Yeah. Another thought that I really shifted from, I think this was one of the biggest releases was not making meaning out of where an object was. Oh my gosh. That was a huge breakthrough.
Amelia: Yes. There are oftentimes where we live life, mess occurs, objects get out of place, the kitchen will always need cleaning at the end of the day. And what I noticed was you were thinking that it should be different and we had to kind of unpack and untangle, well, have you actually done the work to tidy up at the end of the day? Well, no, not yet. And we kind of jumped to that conclusion of like, we are going to reach a destination one day when the laundry will be done forever. But that's not true. It's not possible. We are living our lives day to day, but it's natural for us to think that objects should be put away or things should be more tidy. If we just clean it up and get it perfect, then it'll stay that way. That's also a myth.
Sade: That was the myth I've been trying to create and bring into reality my whole life. I was like, I had “Everything Everywhere, All at Once” syndrome. I love that movie by the way. Like easily my favorite movie in the last five years. I wanted it all to have already been done. It didn't matter if I just had a meal, I just had a cup of coffee at my desk and I put it on my desk and kept working. I wanted the cup of coffee to… somehow, and this is all my thinking, listen this was not conscious thinking, just so you know. But then I would be frustrated if I got up, I went somewhere, I came back and then the cup of coffee was still there thinking, well it should already have been taken down and put in the sink, like already. Not just that I should do it now, but I should already have done it. And that just created so much suffering.
Amelia: But you're not alone in that regard because what I like to call them are micro decisions or micro moments in which where you set the coffee cup down rather than following all the way through and taking it to the kitchen and that actually creates clutter every micro moment where we don't return things to where they belong or their home. And then naturally we come back later and we're like, wait, I can't find my car keys. Or why is the mug not taken downstairs? It's simultaneously the unconscious choice to place something on the closest surface, totally normal and natural. And then the tendency to come back later and be like, wait, things aren't exactly where they should be because our brain loves predictability and consistency, but we actually have to create that through our habits on a daily basis but we're not aware of that.
Sade: Yeah. And I had the other thought too, when you talk about habits, like, I should already have learned this, which is fascinating because that was what I was told as a kid. So like there was no moment in which someone said, okay, I'm going to teach you how to do this. But then there was always the expectation that I should know how to do it. So it was always criticism on the back end. Like why haven't you done, how haven't you done your laundry or whatever? Or why didn't you put these clothes away? Why didn't you do the dishes? But there was no instruction like, hey, before I come back from work, do these things. It was always like, why didn't you do it? And I think that tape just kept playing in my head like my whole life.
I think when I came to coaching with you, I wanted to fix that. I wanted to get the habit, now I have the habit and now I'm good but I couldn't really get there until I stopped making meaning out of where objects were. So the fact that I had all the stuff in my basement, I had to stop making it mean that there was a problem. I had to stop making the coffee cup mean anything. And I think that one of the ways I reframed it with you was that it's just an object, a neutral object. It's just occupying this particular position in space. It doesn't mean anything about me. I think I had made things about me for a really long time, like if something was somewhere my character or my person or my identity was attached to it.
Amelia: And that's where you get into the socialization and standards and expectations especially that we discovered and discussed in our feminist coaching certification. We forget to look at the way in which we're raised, the messages that we receive in our community, from our family, from social media about what it means to keep a tidy home or be organized or be productive. And we think that we should know and have these skills, but they're actually transferable. You can learn them and they can be taught to you. And if they're not, you cannot have them, be at a disadvantage. That's not a problem, it's just an area for growth that you can go out and explore and learn with support for sure.
Sade: Yeah. And the skills are not, and I think this helped me a lot when you told me like, these skills are not common skills. You were like, I'm a professional organizer. Like I have gone to learn these things, I have gone to learn a way of thinking and a way of seeing spaces and objects and where things need to be in space to look a certain way. You were like, so you explain to me, like you had this whole education and I was expecting myself to wake up every day with what you have gone through, so unfair.
Amelia: So many of us we think that it should be inherent. We think that we should know how to organize and keep a space tidy. And especially if you're living with a neurodiverse brain, those things might not come straightforward, easy as pie to you. And also, we all have our own ways of organizing and creating systems and that's what we did together. You figured out what made sense for your life and for your home and created a whole kind of to-do list for yourself that you steadily worked through with my support on decluttering and creating space. It was profound y'all, she did some serious work.
Sade: It was work. I didn't realize how much work it was going to be. I didn't realize how deep. I knew looking around, like things weren't where I wanted them to be but I didn't realize how deep in my person and in my thinking. But our thoughts create our results. So there were decisions that I had just put off for a really long time, what to do about my relative stuff, what to do about the stuff that my ex finally gave to me. What to do about my kids' books. I had all these books from forever, my kids' clothes from when, like I just put off all the decisions. I was just like, the decisions felt really, really big. And of course I was in the middle of dating and getting married again and I was in the middle of building a business and starting a podcast and social media and coaching clients.
So there were a lot of reasons why, I guess, I chose to put off those decisions. But I think when we started digging into it, I was like, oh, well this makes sense, like where I'm starting from makes sense. And I remember I just started from the top. I started with the upper floor of the home. I went like, okay, decisions about my bedroom and my jewelry. And it was interesting, the big things weren't too bad. It was the little things. It was like a little, it was like my jewelry and okay let's organize this. And it was like, oh my God, because there were tiny little things in my junk drawer. Those were the things that freaked me out.
Amelia: I'm curious if you can bring to mind what emotion you were able to shift into that allowed you to make those decisions. Because most people think they can jump right to the decision making and like, oh, I just need to make decisions. And they'll set up a three hour marathon organizing session and then get overly exhausted because making decisions is hard, but you actually need a particular kind of set of emotions or emotional space to be in to make those decisions.
Sade: Yeah, we definitely work together to make some decisions ahead of time. Like if I said, okay, I'm decluttering this space, I think one of the questions you would ask was like, what are the categories? I remember that with the smaller items in my bedroom, I didn't know what the categories were. That was the thing because I hadn't even looked at stuff in a long time. So the first thing I did when I did that was, so I guess you could say the emotion at that point was maybe a little bit of space or maybe capable or adequate. Where it's like, I was like, okay, I can take the first step of deciding what the categories are going to be so that when I look through everything in this bin or in this box or everything on the shelf, everything is going to go into these four categories, discard, keep. And so making the decision about where everything was going to go was like the big decision that made the way for all the other decisions.
Amelia: I love that because I often talk about, and this is a tool that professional organizers use. We actually start at the end. So before, most people want to just dive into their project and use willpower and kind of push through but there's essential pre-work of like, okay, where are we going? What are those categories? What does done or organized in this one room or set of drawers or closet look like? Deciding in advance because then your brain knows exactly where you're going and it'll figure out how to get there along the way. I love that because you learned to figure out where you were going before you started because then you have some direction for the process. And I'm sure there's an analogy for clients to look for dating in, right? For clients who are looking for another partner.
Sade: We start with our core values, we start with self discovery. What is the relationship vision, what does the relationship you want actually look like? And then that way we know who to say no to along the way, who to say yes to, who to say, okay, I'll consider, that's important. That's the biggest time waster in dating is not having that clarity.
Amelia: So I love that there's pre-work with clutter and organization as well and some emotional processing that can happen along the way.
Sade: And I know we watch on TV, we watch the home makeovers where the organizers come in and do all the things. But I really appreciated doing it this way where you just coached me and then I went to do it. I mean there were a few sessions where we did a walkthrough where you would look at things and then give me some ideas or tell me what to do. But for the most part it was really, I knew that this was about me. This was about how I wanted to see the world. I know I'm not a minimalist yet. I'm not even minimalist. I think that's also where you're like, but that was my end goal. But in order to even get halfway there, I had to get to the place where I was like, I wanted to feel like I knew what I owned. I wanted to know what all the objects were that were in my home. And I wanted to be able to find them. I wanted to be able to say, this item is in this place and I can go straight to it, which is really what we've accomplished. That's where I am right now. I discovered something about my own brain, which is that I like to be able to see things. So I don't like closed closets, I don't like cupboards. Something about that is like, I don't like it.
Amelia: Yeah. That's a huge discovery and that's an important aspect of this work is not necessarily taking what you see on Instagram and Pinterest as the way to be, but to figure out your own way of operating within your own home, within your own space. And that's such a brilliant awareness because you are creating the system for organization within your home. And so the ability to maintain it and go back to it will make sense to you rather than someone from the outside. I love professional organizers dearly, but when someone else does it for you, then you still have to learn to maintain. It's a finished product but that inner work of, or the skills of knowing what goes where and why, with coaching you figure that part out.
Sade: Yeah. And my WHY, and I have very good reasons right now. Even though some things in my home are not where another person might, like my shoes are not in my bedroom and they're not in the shoe closet. Like I have a couple of shoes in the shoe closet downstairs in the coat closet downstairs. But I have my shoes now in clear boxes in the hallway. But I was like, this makes sense to me. This works for me. Like something about, it's the hallway, not the downstairs hallway. The upstairs hallway outside my bedroom just makes sense. And I don't even know that I could explain it, but first of all, I can see every shoe. So, which was amazing to be able to do that because I think I had some of them in shoe boxes before that I just kind of stacked neatly in my closet. And then I had others in other places and they were all in one place where I could see every single one. And there's something about that in-between spot in my home that my brain is like, yeah, this is the right place for us.
Amelia: That's beautiful though, because when you free yourself up from those rules and standards, expectations, the way things are "supposed to be," then you're going to reach that feeling of ease or alignment that is sustainable. And you'll always return the shoes there and maintain that because it feels good.
Sade: Yes. I think that's another thing I learned about. So I was really bad at celebrating. I'm a better coach than I am a client.
Amelia: We all are.
Sade: Like I was definitely a client working with you. So celebrating was a huge part and I really do appreciate you constantly bringing me back to celebrating my small wins. I think it was just hard because it wasn't something that I had found reason to celebrate my whole life. Even when I had done, because I remember my homes were always, especially when I was a stay at home mom, because I had the time and space and that was my focus, my homes were always neat and tidy and all the things, but I never felt good. I never felt like I was there, even when on the outside I was there.
Amelia: And that's again, very common. Our brains are built to seek. They're built to go for the change, to always be looking, always be searching for the next thing rather than to be settled where we are. And so when we reach a milestone, no matter how small or how huge, it's hard to stop and pause and go like, oh, I arrived at that place that I was trying to get to. Immediately we turn and we're like, no, well what room is next? And let's get into the basement and let's go fix something else. It can be a challenge to stop and just pause for a minute and be like, wow, I did that.
Sade: Yeah that felt good. I think more of the small wins and the celebrations. I think after the first half, the first six months and the second six months I was a little bit better and I moved a little bit faster. I think the second half was when I really tackled the basement. When I got like, okay, let's look at the big stuff that brings all the feelings up, and process some grief there. There was a lot of grief that moved through. There was some anxiety, there was somewhat, “What are people going to think?” Making decisions for other people who were not necessarily present to make the decisions And then just being willing. I think willingness was a lot of the emotion I felt at that point where it's like, yeah, this basement is full of stuff and I'm willing to do what it takes or to feel the consequences of taking care of it.
So even if I threw stuff away and regretted it afterwards, like, oh, we can talk about my books because books were a big thing. I did the whole, oh, but I still want to read this book. And I remember this has definitely stuck with me, you said, well, could I trust myself to get the book again? Could I trust myself to have the resources to purchase the book again if I wanted to? And that applies to a lot of different items.
Amelia: Yes because for example, books, journals, photos, all of those things going through that process, if you're a scrapbooker and you want to reach a destination, all of those things take time. And we forget that we actually have to consciously choose to sit down and do the scrapbooking or digitize the photos or read the books or whatever it might be. And I remember talking with you about like, how many hours are you going to dedicate to reading, which of course we all want to do but comparing that with reality and saying like, well, if you create some space and have the title of the book or a photo of the cover, you can always check it out from the library or order it again when it reaches the top of your priority list and you have the dedicated time to do the task and sit down and read or go through photos.
Sade: Do you remember when I wanted to save my kids' children's books so that my grandchildren would read the same ones?
Amelia: Super, super common. I've done this a lot. I started off as an in-home organizer and then became a coach. And it's really common and I actually went through this for myself because my children were young. We bought beautiful, beautiful picture books. And you're like, they're going to grow up and one day they're going to want them for their kids and that makes sense. Yet that might be 20 years away, it might be 30 years away. And that's a lot of space to take up and time. And if you move during those transitions, you have to seal them up and they have to be protected. And it's always good to reflect on your own journey and think, “Do I want to play with stuff that my parents kept for me?”
Sade: I thought about my children and I was like, they for sure do not want me bringing any dusty stuff from my basement to their homes. Like I reflected on, that was my older two and I was like, no, they don't want this. This is all me.
Amelia: It makes sense and in reality it probably won't work out the way that you imagine it will and there's a little truth telling there.
Sade: Yeah. That moment definitely freed me from a lot of like, oh, what this and then the great grandchildren and then it'll be in our little chest that will be passed down. And I was like, they're not passing anything down.
Amelia: Yeah. They're going to later look at you and be like, oh, can you take us to the bookstore so we can get some new books?
Sade: Yes, there are some things that I am keeping, but very few and extremely thoughtful and with their permission. So I actually like some of the times, a lot of the things that they ended up wanting me to keep, had to do with their journals and things that reminded them of their current journey of how their childhood applied to their current journey. So they were really more interested in their art and the little books that they wrote when they were kids, which volume-wise was thankfully a lot smaller volume, than the picture books I was wanting to keep.
Amelia: And you bring up such an important point, which is the process of keeping something. Most folks worry that when they work with a professional organizer or a clutter coach, that someone's going to tell them what they have to get rid of. But there's a part of the process where the intentional deciding of what to let go of also involves the intentional deciding of what to keep. And it's actually going through that process and going through and sitting down and reflecting that is the valuable moment. Because of course you don't have to get rid of anything that is meaningful or powerful to you or anyone else in your family. It's consciously knowing why you're choosing to keep it in your life.
Sade: Yeah. Let's talk about the cost of keeping something and things earning their place because I had never thought about that before.
Amelia: Yeah. I think that's huge. So whether we buy something or it ends up in our home, we just assume that it continues to be there in our closet or in our pantry or in our basement. But there is a beauty in reflecting on that particular object and asking, is it earning, its keep? Does it constantly or often enough give back to me to deserve its place in my home. It's like, is it paying rent? Like what joy, what benefit is it giving back to me that I am now still continuing to give it permission to hang in my closet or take up space in my basement or be in my pantry.
Sade: And I think for me, like looking back at that, it came back to me seeing myself, which I know a lot of women, we see ourselves as like we're nurturers and caregivers and everything is for someone else. But now it's starting to say, wait, these objects work for me.
Amelia: They do, everything.
Sade: Not the kids and not the husband and not anybody else, they work for me. And then me thinking about how I want it to be, “How do I want my kitchen to be? How do I want my pantry to be?” And it sounds very me focused, but I needed to center myself in those spaces just for a minute because I'd never been centered.
Amelia: Yes. And I talk a lot about that, shifting into the center of your life and your home, because again, we are socialized, we're raised to always be giving, always be available to everyone else. And instead of thinking like I'm creating a home so that everyone else can feel comfortable, there's a beauty in saying, like, oh actually this is my space and I deserve to feel relaxed and calm at the end of the day. And what choices can I make to make that happen? And then of course, get everybody else on board.
Sade: Yeah. Which is a whole journey in and of itself. But I think we were able to craft a journey that didn't require, like it didn't, I think one thing that I was able to do was really just there was enough work for me do in my own healing and in my own thinking that nobody really needed to be on board, at least for this first part of the journey. And I was watching a, I forget, a show about minimalism, and there are some families who have actually been able to create a minimalism for the parents while letting the children keep all their toys. And so there are ways to be fluid and flexible in thinking about, I'm centering myself, but I can also then just let other people be who they are and just have like these, not even just physical boundaries, but mental boundaries where there are some things I don't even look at. I walk past the children's rooms and I closed the door. It's like, “That's your space.” I just don't want to look at it.
Amelia: Yeah and what you brought up is that you get to define what minimalism means and looks like in your home. You get to define what clean or tidy or organized looks like in your home. We subscribe to these kinds of larger understandings of those particular words. But honestly behind closed doors, the state of your home is about you and your life. And you get to decide what it looks like and how it feels.
Sade: Yeah. And I can definitely say mine feels like home, it feels like me. It feels like, oh, if it reflects, not necessarily reflecting me and my identity, but reflecting choices. I can see, oh, this space looks like this and this is how I've made choices for this and I feel good versus when I started working with you where it was like walking into a space, like light waves bounced back. So literally it was like, I walked into a space and every object, wherever it was, was sending me messages and my brain was just like, well, this shouldn't be here and that shouldn't be here and I need to decide about that. And when are you going to get to that? But like now there isn't that anymore. So whether something's out of place at that moment, it's like, oh, that's out of place and that's neutral or everything's in place, which a lot of the spaces now are just really free of. I've just made so many decisions.
Amelia: The visual clutter is gone.
Sade: And it's just like, oh yeah, I know exactly where everything is. Everything is exactly as I would like it or if I need to fix something, so let's say the dog like she does will chew up her toy and then there are pieces everywhere. It's like, oh, that will only take me two minutes to sweep that up. And we did talk about time too.
Amelia: Yes. Because that's what happens. A project grows in size in our minds. The more we avoid it, we become overwhelmed. But when we get honest and truthful with ourselves and set a timer. I'm going to work on this for 30 minutes or an hour or a reasonable amount of time. It's that mindset of small wins, small progress that then we can internalize and it reinforces like, oh yeah, I can do this. I have the skills, I can figure this out. That really makes a difference and that's the internal permanent change because you get to understand that it's okay if the junk drawer comes back because I can go back and fix it and it's only going to take 10 minutes, not the 45 minutes that my brain tells me it's going to take or the three days to clean out the garage or other space. But you did a tremendous amount of not just internal work, but the time dedicated to taking those steps. And now you don't have to do that in the future.
Sade: Exactly. I mean, it culminated on the 4th of July. My 4th of July weekend was spent filling a 30-foot dumpster with stuff from my basement. Like I had stuff from the marriage and just all the things went in there, it was full, like that was the largest dumpster the city had available. And like everybody gets the 20-foot, I was like, ah, just in case give the 30-foot and it was full and it just felt so good. I videoed myself closing it with all the things inside. And it really was, and I think this is why this is so pertinent to being on this podcast about divorce is because if you had told me, oh, when I first got divorced or that, yeah, decluttering is a part of healing from divorce. I don't think I've seen that conversation anywhere because I don't think we think that's a thing, but it turned out that it was.
Amelia: Yeah. And that's often what folks come to me for are experiences like life transitions. So whether it is divorce or becoming a caregiver or grieving, because you now have inherited someone else's clutter from their home, There's so much in there in terms of emotions and storytelling, the way we attach to our belongings. And on the other side is creating your new identity, the new version of you that is lighter and more free. And especially with divorce, if you're moving into a new home or a new space, you have the opportunity to create it exactly like you want for yourself because it might not be a shared home anymore. And that's a journey in and of itself figuring out who you are underneath it all separate from someone else's belongings and stuff.
Sade: Yeah. And someone else’s thinking, rules that we've come with about how to set up the home. One of my favorite clients just purchased a home. You know who you are, she's going to be listening to this, I know. She just purchased her home after her divorce and one of the things she said was, no one can tell me what color to paint the walls. And she's just so tickled and delighted about that because her first marriage was different, a completely different story about making those choices. So for anyone listening, I would say consider whether clutter or belongings or your home still holds stories or suffering from divorce or from a life transition, from someone who passed away or childhood or whatever, who knows. Like these things come together in really, I guess really strange ways.
Amelia: Yeah. And I'm curious if you're willing to speak for a moment or two. You mentioned at the very beginning a kind of mourning the loss of your marital home. I think that that's just very valuable, maybe for your audience to know that that is normal.
Sade: Yeah. And I think that was one of the reasons I didn't declutter for years all the stuff that came out of that home was because going and interacting with those objects represented a major loss. So literally walking through and saying, okay, I need to decide whether I'm keeping this set of bunk beds or not. Am I going to give it away or sell it or whatever? Meant remembering that I had separated from my ex, not with the intention of getting a divorce but with the intention of saying, hey, let's work on this. And he had said, yeah, let's work on it. And then filed for a divorce and that home represented my work and my savings and where my children had thought they would grow up and all of those things, So all of the moments leading up to that, I'll talk about this part because this was especially painful.
At the time we had moved into that home. We'd only been in that home for a few months. So that was the 4,000 square foot. It had seven bedrooms, five bathrooms. It was like, okay, everybody's dream home. But we hadn't sold our old home so it was on the market. I think we had just signed a contract and I moved with my five children into my friend's basement because my thinking at the time was just not where things ended. And I was pretty much a people pleaser, still believed a lot of lies that were told to me and things like that. And so I remember coming to the title office and signing the sale of the home instead of what I look back and you know now and said, oh, instead of moving into my second home with my children, I sold it without knowing that I wasn't going to ever go back to the other home.
I think just the regret and the blame and the loss and the grief around that was really painful. So it wasn't just the loss of the marital home, it was actually the loss of two homes. And I was like, dang girl, you should have been, what I kept telling myself was, you should have been smarter. You should have been smarter. You should have been smarter. Now I am and when clients work with me on divorce, I'm like, listen, do all the things that I didn't do. But I think the grief was bigger than it would've looked on the outside. Like a lot of people it's like, oh yeah, I just got a divorce, blah blah blah. No, there was a lot there.
Amelia: Yeah. That internal soundtrack will get you every time.
Sade: Oh yeah. And I think once we untangled that and I released the regret and came into acceptance and compassion, I had to find the compassion for the me who was just, I was just so tied up in caring for my kids and I wanted to make sure they were okay and I wanted to make sure they were safe, which is one of the reasons I had left was because they weren't safe. It really wasn't even about me necessarily. They weren't safe at that moment and she was doing the best that she could and she did the right thing. She really did do the right thing for the humans involved.
Amelia: Oh, what a gift.
Sade: Yeah, I can give her that credit now.
Amelia: I love it.
Sade: Yeah. Aw, thank you. I really appreciate the work you do. I appreciate your patience in our coaching sessions and just your ability to hold space and your ability to validate my thinking and validate your belief in me and my ability to do anything that I set myself to. So I wanted to just share this breakthrough, this year-long breakthrough with my audience because I know there's someone out here listening, going through similar things that I went through and thinking about clutter or dealing with clutter. So it's been my privilege to introduce you to the audience and have you help me share my story.
Amelia: Oh, it's been an absolute honor. And for the listeners out there, even if you don't decide to get a dumpster, you can start sort of one decision, one drawer, one area at a time and I encourage you to do that. But you shared with me something towards the end of our coaching sessions, which is that you wouldn't have been able to fill that dumpster at the beginning of our year together. So I just want to highlight the work and the effort and the patience and compassion that you showed yourself for untangling all of those stories over the course of our time together. And then when it happened, like what happened?
Sade: Oh my God. It was magical. It was just like, I just kept taking pictures of the dumpster. I have pictures of the dumpster from every angle, like from the top of the house so you can see it from the top.
Amelia: You were so proud. And I was so proud. And I think I said to you, you'll reach a point where you're just going to walk through your home and scan and look at everything and go, could that go in the dumpster?
Sade: Yeah, I did. It was towards the end because there was just so much stuff. But I did get to that point where I was just like, what else can go? There's still like half a foot of space and I'm allowed to fill it all the way up. What else can go in there? I did get to that point. It was like, it was so good. It was so good.
Amelia: So if you believe that it's not possible for you, Sade, you are an amazing example.
Sade: Oh for sure. I should have been voted least likely to fill a dumpster with stuff for sure. Like nothing at the beginning of this journey indicated where I would've gotten to. Nope. No. So thank you. Please tell the listeners if they want to work with you or even have a conversation, I will first of all just plug your newsletter. Get on Amelia's email list because her emails are like gold. So do what you need to do to get on an email list. Even just your email from today, I was like, oh yes, I think you had a line in there, follow the adventure and I was like, yes, I'm going to do that.
Amelia: I love it. I love it.
Sade: Yeah, like just a little piece at a time is just so helpful.
Amelia: Thank you. I truly appreciate that. Well everyone can connect with me at A Pleasant Solution in all of the places. So I also have a podcast called A Pleasant Solution, Embracing An Organized Life. My website, A Pleasant Solution, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the places. Yeah, I'd love to hear from you.
Sade: All of the links will be in the show notes. And if you get an email list, she has workshops from time to time on things like decluttering, paper, all of these things, it's super helpful. I encourage you to follow her. Amelia, thank you for coming on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.
Amelia: It was my honor.
Sade: Thank you listeners. We appreciate your time and attention and we will see you next time.
Outro: Hey y'all, I'd be honored if you'd take three minutes to leave a review of this podcast. Your time is precious and by leaving a review, A Pleasant Solution will reach more listeners and lives. I'd also love to hear your feedback and share your review on a future episode. Talk to y'all soon and remember, you are more organized than you think.