Minimalism as a Boundary Practice

I kept a toaster on my counter for four years that I hated every single morning.
It was from my mother-in-law. Bright red. Enormous. The kind that takes up a third of your counter space and makes you feel slightly annoyed every time you look at it. I didn’t want it when she gave it to us. I smiled and said, “Thank you, this is so thoughtful,” drove it home, put it on the counter, and there it sat.

Every morning, I’d look at it and feel this low-grade something. Not anger exactly. More like... resignation. Like my kitchen wasn’t quite mine. But I kept it. Because what was I going to say? She’d picked it out. She was excited about it. Getting rid of it felt...wrong?

I didn’t understand what the toaster was actually doing to me until I started noticing a pattern. My closet had the same energy. There was the dress from my aunt, two sizes too small, that I’d kept for five years “in case I lost weight.” The hand-me-down sweater from a friend that wasn’t my style but felt rude to donate. Two sets of inherited dishes stacked in a cabinet I never opened, because my grandmother had used them, and who gets rid of their grandmother’s dishes?

None of it was mine. Not really, you know. I’d never chosen any of it myself. But somehow, slowly but surely, my space had filled up with other people’s stuff, other people’s expectations, other people’s feelings about what I should keep.

And I wondered, during that period, why I found it so hard to say “no” to things that truly mattered. Why I’d say “yes” to volunteering for things I didn’t have time for. Why I’d agree to plans I didn’t want to make. Why I’d take on other people’s emotional weight until I was exhausted and resentful and couldn’t figure out how I’d gotten there.

The toaster was telling me. I just wasn’t listening. Every time I looked at it and chose to keep it, something small was being reinforced. I was rehearsing the idea that my preferences were... negotiable. That someone else’s feelings about an object were more important than my daily experience of my own kitchen. That saying “no”, even silently, even just by giving something away, was too risky.

And the hard thing is that each decision makes complete sense. Of course, you keep the gift. Of course, you hold onto the hand-me-down. Of course, you store the inherited furniture. Each one feels like kindness, like not making a fuss over nothing. But together, they add up to a life that doesn’t quite fit you. A space that feels like a storage unit for other people’s expectations. And a self that’s gotten very, very good at accommodation.

The spiral I lived was embarrassingly predictable, looking back.
I kept the thing. Then I resented the thing. A low hum of irritation every time I dusted around it or reorganized a shelf to fit it or just looked at it in passing. Then I started to resent myself for being the kind of person who couldn’t just deal with it, couldn’t just get rid of it, was stuck in this dumb situation over something that objectively didn’t matter.

And then, quietly, the resentment would leak into the relationship. Not toward the red toaster specifically, but toward the whole dynamic it represented. Toward the pattern of accepting things I didn’t want to avoid a moment of discomfort.

The thing about guilt is that it makes you believe it’s protecting the relationship. But it wasn’t protecting anything. It was slowly poisoning the well.

I finally got rid of the toaster during a particularly brutal week when the triplets were small, and I was running on nothing (well, except cold coffee), and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t manage the counter space. I couldn’t be careful about it anymore.

I told my mother-in-law we were simplifying the kitchen. She just said, “Oh, of course.” That was it. Four years of that low-grade morning resentment, and it ended with four words and a trip to the recycling station.

I stood in my kitchen afterward and felt something I didn’t expect: not just relief about the counter space, but something bigger. Like a small thing had shifted. I had said “no”. It had been fine. The relationship was fine. The world was fine. And I thought: what else have I been keeping that I don’t have to?

I’m not going to tell you to go clear out your whole house today. :)
That’s not how this works, and I think the pressure to do that is actually one of the ways the minimalism world has led people wrong. I think it’s not about the dramatic purge, but about noticing.

What’s in your space right now that isn’t really yours? Not legally. Emotionally. What are you keeping because getting rid of it would require a conversation you don’t want to have, or would make someone feel something you don’t want them to feel?

That thing is practicing something in you. Every day it sits there. Maybe start there. Because you deserve to notice what you’re rehearsing. And because sometimes the gentlest way to start learning that your “no” counts is to say it first to an inanimate object that can’t argue back.

The toaster can’t be hurt. The obligation you feel toward it isn’t real. And removing it is still practice for the moments when the stakes feel much higher.

Your “no” counts. Starting with the small ones is allowed.

P.S. You don’t have to get it right all at once. I didn’t. I still have some things in my house I’m working up the courage to let go. This is slow, honest work. But it is work that pays you back.