A few years ago my Mom read a book by Marie Kondo (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing) and mentioned to me the concept of items in your life “sparking joy” or else getting rid of them. Over the years I’ve done my fair share of decluttering, and I’d say about 80% of my house feels pretty neat and tidy. It is SOOOO much less stressful to me since we got rid of a million kitchen implements, toys, books, half empty bottles under sinks, etc. — and we’ve made a conscious effort to not replace those items with more stuff!
However, the two parts of my life that I cannot seem to get on board with purging completely are my clothes and my photo albums. My photo albums are all for sentimental reasons. Some day I need to get things digitized and captioned (and printed into a nice book so we actually look at them) or else get rid of them. I have dozens of photo albums from throughout my life. I seriously love photos, but they’re overwhelming to me at this point as well.
But, that’s not the point of this post. Today I’m talking about clothing. I just watched the first episode of the new Netflix Series “Tidying up with Marie Kondo” and got re-inspired to tackle my closet. I find I hold onto clothes for one of 2 reasons.
- Sentimental Memories (that shirt was Jaime’s before she died, I was wearing that dress at my sister’s wedding, those were my favorite basketball shorts in high school, etc)
- Weight Loss Dreams, i.e. Those were my favorite jeans 40# ago, I used to love wearing that tank top to show off my back and arms, damn I looked good in that dress when it fit me, etc.
I’ll let you guess which category 80% of the clothes in my closet currently fall into. *sigh* SO, that’s my new decluttering goal in life – letting go of the weight loss dreams clothes. When I lose the weight, I want to get new clothes anyway! 😉 The other night I started with my drawers (socks, underwear, sports bras, regular bras, PJs, swimsuits, & workout pants), and my goal is to move onto my closet THIS MONTH. I’m putting that out in the universe so that I actually do it. 🙂
On a funny note, I literally found nursing pads in my bra drawer and the hospital issue mesh postpartum undies in my underwear drawer, so clearly those have been in there since my last big purge 5 years ago! It feels so good to let go of all the things that don’t spark joy in my life, even when the process itself can be painful to start.