We asked different writers about what it means to get rid of the physical, psychic or emotional clutter in their lives. Here are their stories.

I am not sure how I became a hunter in these aisles.

The aisles of thrift shops so thick with clothes that it deadens sound. Legions of white plastic bags brimming with old fur, a castaway Rive Gauche shirt, a pair of old Fleuvogs. My closets always burst forward with rescued textiles, haunted by the auras and smells of others. A closet of tender ghosts.

In all of my apartments and studios of my twenties and thirties there was always too much. Jewelry wound around each other, necklace to bracelet, communing in the tins and old cases that I tucked into corners and balanced along dressers. I was never sure about the coats as they burst forward with all of my intentions to delint and mend. The coat closet was where my propensity to tuck thrifted things away announced itself vehemently. The coats were always too much. They struck an uncomfortable chord.

I could write an entire book on how this behaviour became a vintage shop. During the days of Melanie’s Closet, I would joke about how the rented shop front was my solution to my over burdened closets. It didn’t take long before the shop succumbed to the tucking problem. Nest after nest lined with ball gowns and beadwork.

I found Maralyn’s shop on College at the front of an old house, its floors full of forties gowns and cat hair. I gained entry into the famed rag shops in industrial bunkers in Scarborough, with their caged full of graded clothing. Seas of silks and cottons. Cages of furs and leathers rotting under the weight of themselves. Conveyor belts of clothes being sorted like something out of a Dickens novel. I would liberate a Norma Kamali skirt and a bag of old gowns as I made my way around the tangle of workers and the dust of clothes.

My shops proliferated as well. First Nassau Street across from the famed Ronnie’s, then Dundas Street, and finally on Kensington where I watched others ghosted by clothes attempt to hold back the sea of dresses. The more curated the shop, the more wonderment it stirred in me. I was sure at any moment, that we would all be swallowed up by grosgrain and old rayons that lingered behind the shop or in the basement. We all knew they were there in a giant tangle, waiting. It fiddled with my nerves a bit.

Eventually, I moved onto bricks. My years in Toronto were lined with building unearthings. I dreamed of fixing up the old Gould building on Dundas. Sleeping bricks. In my mind I pulled apart building after building mining for old wood, original moulding, old fireplaces.

One day, with ten dollars to my name, I struck a bargain with Stanley to buy his old building on Dundas and Gladstone. There began a process of helping him with his own tucking problem. Room after room was filled with forty-five years of his life. When I took possession of the building, it came with a mountain of items left behind. Each room was a project of distilling objects. It was somewhere in this mountain of things and piles of bricks that I began to feel the WEIGHT. I had felt it before – I had sensed it milling in the background, but this was the first time it was right in front of me.

As I went through each box in room after room of boxes of someone else’s stuff, a subtle shift occurred – one which I didn’t see at the time, but in retrospect was sizeable – I began to desire the processing of things, as opposed to the tucking of things. What I did tuck away, were a couple of things that came as a result of a process of refining, as opposed to collecting.

Thus began the process of paring down. First, it was the boxes of Stanley’s things. They marched their way down from the third floor of the building, box by box, and were released out into the world, stories and all. I kept a funny toilet paper roll with a built in radio and a teak carving tray with pewter bison heads for handles. Then began the purging of Stanley’s ex-wife’s things on the second floor – an apartment that was no longer used but for the storage of this old narrative. Elsa actually flew in from Saskatchewan, and I helped her go through her items, again room by room and box by box. As a thank-you for helping, I received a Champion juicer from the seventies and two Le Creuset pots.

This process was similarly applied to the renovation of the building. Old ceilings and panelled walls from the seventies were chipped away, until you could see the old plaster and brick. Green shag carpets peeled away into hardwood. I kept what was beautiful. The old gas fireplaces, with their brass covers. The old radiators. The Terrazzo entry.

What was striking about fixing up the building, was the frenzy of purging. I never knew that a building could unearth such a volume of items. The structure became a processing plant of layers. They came down the stairs in big contractor bags. The bags were dragged out onto Dundas Street, then into the old shoe store on the main floor. From there, they were dragged out back into the old garage, where sometimes the pile would threaten to touch the ceiling. Eventually, a truck would come and take everything away.

This happened day after day for an inconceivable amount of days. In me mounted a desire to be rid of things that flirted with desperation. I yearned to be done with stuff.

Eventually, things settled down and found their place. The objects did, at least. Zoots café opened, Pineapple Kensington was a shop that felt curated and open – deviod of the clutter of some of my previous shops. All of the objects of my life aligned after a long period of disruption. Good show. All was where it should be. Except something was happening inside of me that was rather more difficult to explain. There was a bee in my bonnet and a burr under my saddle that took some time to decipher.

In retrospect, as things found their place, a profound weight set into my being. I could write another entire book on the subject of running small businesses in Toronto, the hopeful Jane Jacobean beginnings, the daily struggles, the way myths break and what reality feels like as one survives in the landscape of the city as a small business owner. There is an interesting forging that occurs in the soul as one tries their hand at manifesting a piece of self in one of the commercial places in the fabric of the city.

For all of that, what I will say, is that I would replace none of what was learned in the decade that this became my persona, but that there was something in me that had been profoundly affected by the act of purging, and that I wanted and required more paring down.

The first thing to go was the shop. It was difficult to acknowledge that all of the years of celebrating vintage clothing might be over. This had become such a large part of my life that I was reticent to admit that my interests had changed. Once I was able to wrap my head around this, I decided to pass the store on to a friend who had begun to share the space with me. I took the legions of textiles to another vintage shop and turned the massive piles into a fabulous wardrobe, executed on trade. I walked away from the piles with a classic pair of Hermes pants, a silk Hermes vest with birds on it, a Comme Des Garcons dress. You get the picture. I became interested in refinement, and it began as wardrobe.

I am going to skip ahead here. Or I guess, really get to the heart of things a bit quicker. As the layers of things began to leave my life, it affected my inner life. It was as if I suddenly woke up one day to realize that underneath the piles of things – beautiful as they were, were a bunch of life decisions -cool as they were, that clouded the truth of my direction.

Once the process of unearthing was started, it was as if I was brought to the task of peeling an onion. First the physical objects. Then the businesses. One by each, I passed them on. Lastly, came the bricks. As my desire to leave the city inserted itself into my personal narrative, I was left with the honest truth of my convictions.

Did any of you know that I was a painter?

All those years ago, when I came to Toronto from Vancouver, I was fresh out of a degree in visual art from Emily Carr looking to set up shop as an artist. I know. Its not a new thing. Nonetheless, it was the clearest of intentions. Everything else was intended as the architecture that might be able to support this goal in the city. A girl has got to pay the bills. When I finally realized that the architecture of my intentions had overtaken the intention, I began to understand what needed to happen.

The major systems of businesses and the ownership of bricks was really neat. I was happy that I had been able to make such success in a difficult city to find your way in. I also realized that there was no way that any of this was going to make me feel as awesome as I would feel if I dove head first into painting. Once this truth was uttered, the stripping away became more of an emotional process. Instead of getting rid of stuff, I was dismantling exterior personas, income, bricks.

This part of the decluttering process took almost two years. As each layer of my life in the city was dismantled, things got clearer. I settled into an old house in Windsor as a home base for painting. I painted. I paint. My partner and I wound up with a small place on Ward Island to come and go from. Not to worry. I would never completely leave Toronto behind. We are in the process of acquiring an old mahogany boat to live on in the nice weather in the city.

Did I mention that wherever I go I paint? As soon as I got everything out of the way, and as soon as I gathered up the guts to surrender to what it is I really wish to do, it proliferated. I am currently booked six months in advance for portraits. Each day, when I sit down in my studio I feel light.

I try not to regret the complicated process that I went through to get to here. It was full of great bead work and rayons, the kalidescope of life in Kensington market, the intensely rewarding affect of a huge renovation, really good coffee. There are no regrets. If you ever run into me in the city, remind me to tell you of the journey I made back to my hometown once the last brick loosened. It involves a wrong train to Sarnia and a cab driving medicine man who was a close relation to Dudley George. It involves the coyote. The trickster of my lessons are always sideways. What starts as a cleaning out becomes a clearing.

It’s just the way I roll.

Melanie Janisse is a poet, painter and critic located in the Windsor/Detroit area. Currently she is involved in an adaption of her book of poems ‘Orioles in the Oranges’ into a stage production set to premiere at the Ottawa Fringe Festival in July of 2015. See her work here. Follow her on Twitter & FB.