Mamarati

I love a good purge.

I mean, I love it afterward when I have room in a drawer, cabinet or closet.

Before the purge, I am not so in love. I don’t want to let go of a single thing. I think that the first 20 years of life — having nothing — made me spend the next 10 years collecting every little particle that entered my universe.

Then I had to make a series of moves. From giant apartments and a big house (complete with off site storage unit) into a tiny apartment. TINY. That helped me come to grips with my problem. It made me realize a few things…

First, that it’s OK to get rid of stuff. I’m going to get more stuff at some point. I will probably never be so addicted to something that I spend all my money on that one thing to the exclusion of everything else. I will not ignore the necessities of life like food, clothing and shelter in favor of something. That’s not me. That was my mother and I’m not my mother. Yay.

Second, all that stuff isn’t important any way. But, I like stuff. Why oh why do I like it so much??? What’s the deal with stuff? Who cares about all that stuff? It’s an encumbrance most of the time. You have to dust stuff. Pay movers to move stuff. Store stuff. Take care of stuff. Be responsible in the way you dispose of stuff. Ugh. For what?

Third, I don’t have to store every little thing that reminds me of some other little thing. I went through a phase where I thought I was really sentimental. And I kept every little thing. Every receipt, ticket stub, rock, blade of grass, pressed flower, cork… you name it. Ugh. Sure, it’s fun to look through those things once in a while, but what I realized was that the more stuff I saved in the name of sentimentality, the less all of it mattered. I’m not really all that sentimental anyway, so I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s OK to save things like that, though, but for me, it’s better not to.

Now, those are some of the things I learned. Putting those things in practice is another story. I’d say I’m doing pretty well, though. It took me 30 years to get to that point. It’s taken me six more to begin to apply the learning. I go slow. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

At any rate, I’m going through the closet now and I’ve committed to really narrowing it down. Throughout all my childhood, just about all my belongings would fit in one box. Nearly all my clothes would fit in a single suitcase. I could move every single thing I owned in my car — in one trip — up until the time I was about 23. I’m nowhere near that now, of course, and I don’t want to be… but I would love to take up about half the space in the closet that I do right now.

Mental note to self: Talk about how expensive clothes were back when everything wasn’t made in China.