Hey, clutter bugs. Welcome back to the clutter bug podcast. Today is a good one because I am

doing interviews. It's been a while since I've got to chat with somebody on the podcast.

So I'm so excited today to talk with Marissa from A to Zen Life. She is a fellow YouTuber

and minimalist extraordinaire. And she's here to talk to us about simplifying our lives

and just making life easier. So hi, Marissa. Welcome.

Hi, Cass. So excited to be talking to you again. Yeah, I like chatting with you. You've

had big changes. So the last time I talked to you, you lived overseas. Yes. And you were

like living that whole minimalist lifestyle over there. And now you've moved back to America.

But I don't want to talk about that yet. I want to talk about like right from the beginning

if you're cool with that because why why did you decide to be a minimalist and were you

always a person who was kind of a minimalist or were you chaotic? I want to hear your origin story.

Oh, I love this question. No, I and I actually didn't even mean to become a minimalist. It was

actually a completely accidental and organic experience. So to answer your question, no, I've not been,

I'm not a naturally like organized or tidy person. In fact, I've talked about it on my channel.

But I realized that hoarding runs in my family and that my father was probably like as level

three at the time of his passing order. And I still have living relatives who are still there.

So growing up, it was just like normal to keep everything. Like we literally we had two barns.

My dad was a landscaper, but we had two barns. One barn was with the stuff that worked.

And one barn was with the stuff that was like broken or needed fixing. And you know the the

rusty net jars of rusty nails and like you know all the worn out equipment lawn mowers that are

meaning to be fixed. So us as kids too, we would just like keep everything like even when we outgrew

them, just shove them to the backs of the closet. And my childhood bedroom was just like it would

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