Source: Radio New Zealand
Fifteen years ago, Anna Kilpatrick’s life was turned upside down when her children’s father suffered a stroke at the age of 38.
“It blew a hole right through everything”, Kilpatrick told RNZ’s Sunday Morning.
“I ended up being the sole provider for the children and myself.
Anna Kilpatrick’s book, Not Needing New, is out now.
Image Bliss Photography
“And we lost the house, all of us. And we ended up, the kids and I ended up, first of all, living in the school I was teaching in, in the boarding school. And then in our own little flat where we still are now.”
She realised it was easier to be there for her kids with fewer things cluttering her life and started to document her more frugal life.
Kilpatrick has since amassed a following of over 180,000 on Instagram, where she shares her tips for living a minimalist, and more joyous, life.
The flat was in stark contrast to the four-bedroom house where she used to live, she says.
“But the more I settled into it, the more I felt quite comforted and cozy and kind of surrounded by support.”
Her bed is now a shelf, the size of a double mattress, above the hot water cylinder in the flat, she says.
“I just kind of stand on a box and pull myself up. And I’ve got friends who are the same age as me who come over occasionally and they’re like, oh, let’s try and get on your bed. And they can’t do it because they don’t have to do it.
“And I kind of get up there like some lumbering gazelle.”
Anna Kilpatrick with her children on her bed above the hot water cylinder.
Jannine Newman
Her Instagram and book of the same name Not Needing New: A Practical Guide to Finding the Joy of Enough does not set out to romaticise poverty in anyway, she says.
“But finding your own enough in an authentic and kind of really genuine way for you is such a lovely thing.
“It’s so peaceful and comforting, and it brings you a calmness that you’ll never have if you’re constantly searching for the next thing, the next thing, what else do I need?”
When she started to post on Instagram her vintage and charity clothes finds her following took off, she says.
“I was buying everything I needed in charity shops really. And people would often say, ‘oh, that’s a really nice outfit’ or ‘that’s a lovely coat or where did you get that? Where did you find that?’ And I would find myself saying, oh, I got it at the Red Cross or I got it at Cancer Research. And then people would say, ‘God, that’s amazing. I can’t believe you can get that in a charity shop’.”
Then she got a message out of the blue from a woman who worked at a publishing company asking if she’d ever considered writing a book, she says.
“Some people spend two years of their life or whatever trying desperately to get an agent to be interested and one has just come to me. So now I sort of owe it to civilisation to not look a gift horse in the mouth.”
She’s not entirely immune to the evils of comparison however, something she discovered at a school reunion when she turned up in her 1990s car.
“When I came home later I felt really deflated. I felt like I have done the worst out of everybody.
“How have I managed to choose the path that has led me to this tiny flat and this old car that’s still got a tape cassette machine and windy down windows?”
After a while she realised her friends didn’t care that she’d “trundled along in this absolute banger”.
“They weren’t looking at my car. They didn’t care at all. They’re not judging me. They’re just happy to see me. They actually thought the car was quite cute.”
Anna Kilpatrick and her children.
Jannine Newman
We shouldn’t have everything we want all the time, she says, she’s endeavoured to teach her children that if they want something new then they must save up or work for it
“We are just so used to having everything and it’s not good for us.
“It hasn’t made us happy, and it’s taken away our ability to kind of be patient and work towards something.”
Now the children are grown she is saying farewell to her little flat and joining forces with her new partner Gus who helped her renovate it.
“I’m gonna be leaving the beautiful flat soon and I’m going to join the builder. So, it will change and I will get a garden back.”
The thing she’s most excited about is an outside washing line.
“If you haven’t had a washing line for eight years let me tell you, it’s a thing of beauty and wonder. And there’s nothing as nice as washing your bedding hanging it to dry on the line and then putting it on your duvet in your pillowcases.
“That smell of line dried bedding is amazing.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand