I don’t hoard on purpose. I don’t collect things or have an urge to keep going out to buy things. What I do actually do is avoid making decisions about the stuff that I do have.

This year I am getting better about the time management side though. I am carving out daily time to tackle the unwanted items and blogging about it (which gets me writing every day – something I am very passionate about).

Some days I do just ten minutes decluttering and ten minutes writing, and some days I do more. It all depends on what else is happening. I’ve learnt this week not to put pressure on myself to do it. And not let anyone else put pressure on me either.

My excuses in the past have been:

• I can’t make decisions about everything, so it’s going to take years to go through it all
• I don’t have enough time to get rid of all of this stuff
• I’ll only move it to another room for future sorting, so it’s not worth making a start

Letting Go

Today I watched about five episodes of Suits on Netflix whilst I went through bags of stuff (that I have ready been through before) in the spare room. I made a ‘once and for all’ decision about each item in each bag that I went through.

Most of these items have been put somewhere where I can carry it forward to the next step, for example, my focus today was my girls’ old clothes that I’m keeping for ‘someone else’ as they are too small, not liked or are too good to throw away. I’ve struggled to get rid of them for ages. Today, when I walked into the spare room, I knew that I had to make room by getting rid of these bags, so I made the decision to separate them into four carrier bags as follows:

• Dresses and skirts
• Tops
• Shorts, leggings and trousers
• Cardigans and fleeces

I’ve placed all four carrier bags in this plastic Really Useful Box and they are going in the boot of my car ready to take to my friend’s house. She has a young daughter that might like some of them. What she doesn’t want, I’ll ask her to give to charity.

How Do I Feel?

I thought that I would feel upset so I took a picture of the pretty dresses before I bagged them up. Well, actually, I bagged them up and then took them back out to take a photo, ha ha. All the hassle of doing this made me even more determined to get rid of them (which is a good thing!).

I looked at the photo and thought about how I was now going to let someone else enjoy them, whoever that may be. I have this photo as a memory and many others memories of my girls actually wearing the clothes all those years ago. Now they are teens they don’t wear pretty dresses anymore.

As I walked back into the spare room and looked at a corner of reclaimed space, I knew that I was making room for some new memories.

Until tomorrow…

Sandra

(Author of https://mywritingnotebook.com)