get rid of unnecessary possessions

Preparing for another move or two this year, and my bf has also been helping me with some additional motivation every so often.

I have been trying to look at it like this. Things pass through your life, and hopefully while they are there they fill some kind of a valuable role, serve a purpose, are useful. But they are not there to make you happy. (I’m all for aesthetics, but even aesthetics don’t buy happiness.) And objects are not guaranteed to be there forever. Sometimes the price of carrying them around isn’t worth it. Shopping at resale stores and finding ten cent silverware really is the kind of thing that makes buying a set at full price seem like a terrible misallocation of funds. It even makes hanging onto old silverware seem like a terriblepoor use of space and energy. Just think of how much it would cost to transport all these boxes of THINGS to the next place I will live, especially not knowing whether I will even need any of them?

I don’t need to hang onto a “nice” sweater just because I remember it costing me a lot of money a lot more vividly than I remember feeling comfortable wearing it. I can get a new sweater later for a few bucks, if I need one. But it’s pretty obvious that my closet is 90% full of things I don’t actually need and 10% of things that will do just fine.

Well, I hated the shirt I put on after I got home last night, so out it goes. Not sure why I’ve kept it so long, but no reason to keep making that mistake.

It’s depressing to look in my closet most days. Now that I’m not working in an office, the dress shirts are far too formal, but I still need something appropriate for my “temp” job, or going to church, or just looking decent.

How many ugly shirts should I hold on to “for exercise purposes”? Obviously not as many as I have.

It’s really important to me to do this in a way that does not involve spending hundreds of dollars on excess crap.

I gave a bag of “nice, but don’t fit” clothes to my college roommate, who has lost weight and can’t afford to buy new things while she attends grad school. I was so proud to see she had filled up the bag with her own selection of things to give away.

I’m trying to help my mother do this as well so that she doesn’t have to live surrounded by clutter and frustrated by the size of her house. I got her a book by Peter Walsh (from Clean Sweep on TLC) called “It’s All Too Much!” and read it with my sister the other night for inspiration before we wrapped it.

Since I’ve moved back home and my sister doesn’t live here full time, she agreed to let me have the big bedroom, so we spent all day cleaning out my stuff and moving her things in. She seemed overwhelmed/frustrated by the idea of moving all her things into a smaller space so I tried really hard to help her move a more appropriate amount of things into her “new” room.

And it’s really impressive, it’s beautiful. Right now, it’s almost like an ideal room. I hope it’ll help inspire us all!

We made a huge pile in the dining room of things for her to think about later, since I thought it was a bad idea to just stuff them all in the closet willy-nilly, and it would have been too time-consuming to stop and look at them as we went.

I got all my suitcases unpacked and put away the things from my life in Toronto, but I’ve got a lot of boxes of things that were packed up the last time I moved and need to be sorted through. Hopefully I’ll be able to purge some more, since they’re out in the open now, and the important things have all been given new homes.

It’s apparently impossible to sell anything in Toronto at the last minute. I gave away rollerblades, sewing equipment, books… sigh. I’ve gotten rid of everything I’m going to on this side of the border, but I think there’s still more work to do once I get back to Texas.

I’ve been doing this in preparation for moving (by air), but I’ve been a bit disappointed by my lack of ability to recoup any of the financial value of the objects I’ve been giving away. Clothes, I’m fine with setting free, but I’ve got a sewing machine and other things I would’ve sold going to him/his family members and I’ve got gift certificates that I won’t use before I leave but for some reason he thinks I’m crazy if I suggest any kind of compensation for leaving them with him. Some of it, I could’ve sold online if I’d tried. Oh well, I guess.

I started working on this when I moved to Canada, but I left a lot of unnecessary stuff behind. Brought “necessary” stuff up on several trips.

Now that I’m moving back all at once, I’ve got to pare it down again to fit into my suitcases. I’ve already thrown out a lot of memorabilia, I’ve scanned nearly all my files into PDFs and shredded the originals, I’ve put together bags of clothes to give away. I need to sell/give away a few things, like my shopping trolley and my sewing machine (sigh).

And then when I get back to Texas, I need to work on purging again (slowly) whilst rebuilding my life.