Out With The Old
Does anyone else have a hard time letting things go?
Not just in the emotional or mental baggage kind of way, but in the physically burdensome junk sort of way.
Yep, spring cleaning has arrived a little late to my house but what else do we have to do? It’s not like going out is safe or smart right now. So we ordered a whole ass dumpster and are attempting to reclaim our space.
I don’t know about you guys, but cleaning always tends to take me ages, mostly because I get caught up scrutinizing everything before I toss it. Am I really sure I won’t need this tails jacket? Maybe I WILL fix and use this broken exercise bike! I can’t just throw away all these DVDs, can I? Yes bitch, you can. That tails jacket, while cool as hell, will never be worn again, that exercise bike lost the timer and a pedal years ago, and we all stream everything online now anyway. Get rid of it.
What can I say? The nostalgia bug hits me hard. I looked through not one but TWO boxes worth of my beloved Beanie Babies collection from the 90s, tags mostly still attached thank you very much, with the intention of getting rid of 90% of them only to talk myself into keeping them all so I can figure out how to turn them into coin purses and dice bags. Why am I like this??
But while it may be slow going, there’s definitely progress. A decades worth of junk has been removed and reorganized to make our coat closet functional again and furniture that’s been falling a part and serving no purpose has been thrown about and broken into pieces and cast away into the dumpster depths. I also found this legit cowboy hat and a branding set so that’s weird, huh?
Of course this whole thing isn’t just about getting rid of the junk we’ve accumulated and ignored but also about clearing out the emotional hang ups and mental blocks we have attached to these things.
May was the one year mark since my mom’s husband passed away and for anyone who has lost someone unexpectedly and/or whom you shared a home with, you know it’s hard to know when is the right time to start packing up their things. The weight of loss has been heavy in this house over the last year and, while I respect the grieving process my mom has been going through, she also deserves to have a space that makes her feel light and comforted instead of like it’s full of ghosts. So when she brought up this dumpster idea, I was more than happy to help.
As we spend the rest of these 10 dumpster filled days cycling from room to room and clearing out the cobwebs, the bad fashions, the unused, and the unwanted here’s hoping that not only will we be reclaiming the space in our home but also the space in our minds that have been cluttered for too long.
When’s the last time you did a big clean sweep of your space? Were you easily distracted? Did you toss things out without a second glance or agonize over what should go and what to keep? What’s one thing you have never been able to let go of no matter how unnecessary or unused it is in your current life? Let me know in the comments!