By 
When I moved to Vietnam with just two suitcases, I told everyone it was about adventure and starting fresh. The truth was simpler and harder to admit: I couldn’t figure out what to leave behind because everything I owned felt somehow essential to who I was.
Four years later, living in my small Binh Thanh apartment with maybe a tenth of what I used to own, I finally understand what was really going on. Most of my possessions weren’t things I needed or even wanted. They were physical manifestations of anxieties I’d never properly dealt with.
The weight of unexamined fears
That storage unit back in Melbourne haunted me for months. Boxes of business suits I’d worn during seven years in corporate strategy. Kitchen gadgets for elaborate meals I never cooked. Books I kept meaning to read but never opened. Exercise equipment gathering dust.
Each item represented a version of myself I thought I should be, or was afraid of not becoming. The suits were my professional identity—proof I was successful, serious, legitimate. The kitchen stuff? Evidence I was a proper adult who hosted dinner parties. The unread books showed I was intellectual, curious, always learning.
What I called “being prepared” was really just anxiety dressed up as practicality. I was holding onto things not because I used them, but because getting rid of them meant confronting uncomfortable questions about who I actually was versus who I pretended to be.
How stuff becomes emotional armor
Living out of a carry-on for months while traveling through Southeast Asia forced a reckoning I’d been avoiding. When you can only keep what fits in a bag, every item needs to earn its place through actual use, not theoretical importance.
I remember standing in a place in Southeast Asia, looking at the business card holder I’d been carrying around for months without using once. It was leather, expensive, a gift from my last job. Throwing it away felt like admitting I wasn’t that person anymore—the one with important meetings and networking events.
Linda Esposito, LCSW, a psychotherapist, puts it perfectly: “Physical clutter begets mental clutter. The minimalists who pare their wardrobe down to 33 items are onto something smart.”
She’s right. But what took me longer to understand was why I’d accumulated all that clutter in the first place. Each possession was a hedge against some imagined future scenario where I’d need to be someone different. My apartment had become a museum of potential selves, none of whom actually existed.
The identity crisis hiding in your closet
After settling into my Saigon apartment, I went through a phase where I wore essentially the same thing every day—plain t-shirts and jeans. Not as some minimalist statement, but because choosing clothes had become exhausting in a way I couldn’t explain.
Then it hit me. Back in Melbourne, getting dressed wasn’t just about clothes. It was a daily performance of trying to be the right version of myself for whatever audience I imagined that day. The creative blazer for client meetings. The casual-but-put-together look for coffee with former colleagues. The trying-not-too-hard outfit for dates.
Each outfit was armor against the fear of being seen as who I really was: someone figuring it out, uncertain, in transition. The clothes were costumes for roles I thought I needed to play.
When I stripped away those options, something interesting happened. Without the ability to hide behind different personas, I had to actually be myself. Consistently. It was terrifying at first, then gradually liberating.
What emptiness actually reveals
My apartment here has good light, a desk by the window, and not much else. Friends visiting from Australia always comment on how empty it looks. Where’s the art? The books? The stuff that makes it feel like home?
But this emptiness isn’t absence—it’s clarity. When you remove the things you keep to manage anxiety about who you might need to be, you’re left with who you actually are.
Those months when I first left corporate life were brutal precisely because I’d lost my props. No office, no title, no carefully curated professional wardrobe. The identity loss was real and I sat in it, uncomfortable and exposed, before writing helped me make sense of who I was without all the external markers.
I discovered that most of what I’d been holding onto wasn’t serving my actual life. It was serving my anxiety about not being enough, not having enough, not being prepared enough.
The fancy coffee machine I never used but kept “just in case I started entertaining more.” The professional clothes for a career I’d already left. The sports equipment for hobbies I kept meaning to start. Each item was a physical manifestation of the gap between who I was and who I thought I should be.
The freedom in accepting what is
There’s a Vietnamese coffee shop I go to most mornings now. Same seat, same order, same notebook. The owner knows me not by what I wear or what I own, but by our brief conversations and the consistency of showing up.
This routine would have terrified my old self—the one who needed options, backup plans, and physical evidence of being interesting and accomplished. But there’s profound freedom in accepting what actually is rather than maintaining props for what might be.
When you stop using possessions to manage anxiety about identity, relationships become clearer. Work becomes more focused. Even simple decisions become easier because you’re not constantly negotiating between who you are and who you think you should appear to be.
What it actually comes down to
Those two suitcases I arrived with have long since been pared down further. Not because minimalism is inherently virtuous, but because I finally understood what I was really carrying.
It wasn’t clothes or books or kitchen gadgets. It was fear. Fear of not being enough without the right accessories. Fear of being seen as unsuccessful without the markers of success. Fear of empty space that might reveal empty parts of myself.
The thing about anxiety is that it expands to fill whatever space you give it. Give it a house, and it will find a reason to need every room filled. Give it a storage unit, and suddenly those boxes become essential to your sense of self.
But when you constrain the physical space for anxiety to hide in, something remarkable happens. You’re forced to face it directly, to name it, to understand what you’re really afraid of. And once you see it clearly, it loses much of its power.
Living with almost nothing didn’t make me a better person. It just made it impossible to avoid seeing who I actually was. And it turns out, that person needs far less than he feared to be okay.