Epiphanies and Purging
I have been moving towards a realization over the past week, and yesterday evening I finally arrived there and had an epiphany. I’ll post more about it later (hint: Law of Attraction), but one of the effects of it is that I’m purging like a madwoman.
I’ve thrown out two garbage bags of clothes that I never really wanted in the first place (things my Mom got for me at yard sales thinking I might like and I felt too guilty to say no to), things that don’t fit anymore, things that are torn up or stained, and things I just don’t like.
I cleaned out our hallway blanket closet and before I started, you had to lean on the door to get it shut because the amount of sheets and blankets were so overstuffed in there. Now there’s an empty shelf, one nearly-empty shelf, the door shuts completely and I’ve got two garbage bags of sheets and blankets in the hall waiting to go to Goodwill.
I actually went through my jewelry.
This one brought up a lot of questions - there are things that I don’t want, don’t intend to wear, I don’t even want to keep for sentimental reasons - but it’s worth something. Like a real gold necklace. What do you do with that? You don’t just want to give it to Goodwill; someone won’t realize it’s real gold and they’ll sell it for 50 cents. What do you do with that?
Then there was the issue of jewelry I *do* want to keep but honestly will never wear. Sure, this stuff can stay in a jewelry box, but it’s not real safe there. If I were to get a safe deposit box, how in the world do you keep necklaces arranged and non-tangled that way? Hrmm. They’re not all “precious” enough to give them big flat boxes like you see in the movies when the bank robber opens up the safe deposit box, opens up the flat velvet box and there’s some multi-million-dollar diamond necklace in there. I just don’t want them tangled, that’s all.
Now it might sound like I’m a jewelry pig, but really I’m not. I hardly wear any jewelry. I have a necklace and two rings that I wear, and that’s it. But when I was a teen and in my early 20’s, I liked to wear neat stuff. Plus I grew up in the 80’s, and that meant lots of costume jewelry. I still had all that stuff kicking around. I ended up tossing out a full gallon-sized freezer bag of jewelry, and filled up another quart-sized freezer bag of jewelry that got relegated to my craft bin.
I also went through two huge moving boxes full of “bathroom stuff” that we never bothered unpacking. Most of this was old expired over the counter medicine, my trash can probably weighs about 30 pounds now. A very few things went onto the shelves in my bathroom linen closet. Ended up with one box being completely empty and the other being about half full of stuff to take to Goodwill. The rest went in the trash.
And it’s only noon.
And I’m still not done.
Hell I’ve not even *started*.
Man, it feels good!
What do you think? I wanna know! Please leave a comment :)
All comments get link love here... I got rid of nofollow!
I haven’t found one case in all my years as a professional organizer where clutter has been caused by sloppiness, laziness, or incompetence. Thinking this way inaccurately puts the blame on you, and is clearly not the best mind-set for achieving organizing success. The actual causes of clutter occur on three levels.
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