#12 - moving on

And letting go of more stuff

Jan 29, 2021

do we own our stuff or does our stuff own us, Riverdale, 2021

POV: I’m Hima - a South Asian, medium brown skin, cis-gender, able-bodied, straight woman living as a settler on the Indigenous lands, T’karonto. I was born in Scarborough, raised Gujarati-Jain, middle-class, with English as my first language. My parents immigrated by choice via London and East Africa and are still together. I have two sisters and no extended family living locally. I experience ADHD symptoms. Much of what I write will be informed by some of these lived experiences.

We are moving tomorrow, and I wrapped up at Artscape yesterday. That is a lot of change at once for my inner Taurus, who is grasping the 18 throw pillows we’ve amassed here in the last 1.5 years like a newborn baby. But a freedom dance party for my inner Libra who can’t wait to take on new short lived hobbies. I don’t know if it’s the full moon, the people-powered economic movement, or the fact that I’m in my luteal phase, but I am as tender as a poached pear.

This is my sixth move in the last seven-ish years, so I know the drill. Resist, purge, grieve, forget, move on. I have purged so much ‘stuff’ in the last almost decade that I sincerely thought I needed a reverse Marie Kondo. ‘I need more stuff, I don’t have enough stuff.’ Even still, I’ve managed to fill two tubs of books, shoes, clothes, games, belts, and repeat kitchen tools to find new homes (and hopefully not landfills). Ciaran has found new life as a Facebook Marketplace hustler, selling nearly 70% of our furniture, most of which I originally bought on Facebook Marketplace.

Moving Diaries
Delhi to Markham, my parents house, in 2014
Markham to DovHerCourt House in 2016
DovHerCourt House to Little Italy in 2018
Little Italy to the Annex in 2018
The Annex to Leslieville in 2019
Leslieville to ??? in 2021

We started packing about two weeks ago, and that gradualness has allowed me to spend some time with my stuff. Like the black and white polka dot dress I bought from Les Parisiennes, a rare and new vintage store that opened in Safdarjung market in Delhi when I lived there that no longer fits after I surrendered my waist to bagels. The now chipped plates that Ciaran and I spent 5 hours at Homesense deliberating on, followed by hauling seven bags of new ‘stuff’ to the Nandos across the street when shopping hanger was no longer manageable. And the woven navy and sea blue coasters that Ciaran’s dad gave me for Christmas during my first trip to Ireland, now stamped with cups of coffee. I even slumped down and indulged in some old birthday cards and passed letters from grade 5 - an index I’ve been carrying from place to place for decades - while packing items in a small plastic container to naturally put into another plastic container. Each time we unhooked a piece of artwork from the wall, I felt the emotion draining out of the space, this home, this place we shaped for months, weeks, and days, quickly returning back into interlocked bricks.

What is stuff if not a digest of our stories, mishaps, tokens of affection, and adaptive coping mechanisms? A constellation of archival material of our internal worlds in a moment. The documentation to prove that we were here, and for better and tough, occupied a body and space for a time period. Marie Kondo says all of your items should bring you joy and I say all of your items should hold a story.

The metaphor of clearing stuff and moving is relatively unambiguous; it makes space for the new, the needed, the desired, the called upon. There is nothing passive about the moving process; it demands your physicality and presence and asks you to confront your stuff and decide if it should stay or go. You have to be in movement with the move. Perhaps we are always in this process - making micro-decisions of what and who gets to occupy our realms of space - adjusting for the feelings we need to survive and thrive. When moving, this process is accelerated, amplified, even desperate. And so, it’s no surprise to me that I am moving again. There has been so much distorted and painful sludge to clear.

For a while, I use to think the Phoenix mirrored my own experience of dying and rising from the ashes every few years, but as of late, I feel more like the fireweed - the bold purple and pink wildflower that grows new colonies where there has previously been a forest fire. The plant that sees destruction as an opportunity to bloom.

Tonight we will finish packing and tomorrow we will put things in storage; a physical representation of what we’re still not ready to let go of. In the evening, we’ll burn some things, sending smoke signals to the spirits for what we are truly ready to let go of. We will thank this space for holding our ordinariness and our secrets, for witnessing the rawest parts of us that most, if anyone, will ever fully see or truly know.

On Sunday, we will be without a permanent home with white walls and a bay window, for now, but certainly with a more spacious home within.

See you next week,

Hima <3

Some artists/authors that are giving me life right now:

British-Nigerian Public Artist - Yinka Shonibare - and oh my word the curves on his work give me ASMR
Fabric artist, Bisa Butler - these are quilts! quilts celebrating Black life
More textiles, but rugs, by Canadian artist, Simone Saunders who studies the Black female body
Spandita Malik captures women of India mixing photography and embroidery
Pakistani photographer, Sarah K Khan’s stunningly human Instagram feed