#1746 not a capsule, but progress

Oh. My. Gosh. What a day!

If you read yesterday's post, you know that today is the day that I began the process of "tidying up". Based on what I learned from the Japanese clutter book, officially called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, I have decided for once and for all to de-clutter my house and take charge of my unkempt and too-much-of-everything world. The first step, according to the KonMari method, is to tidy up your clothes, keeping only the items that "spark joy."

The KonMari method is very specific and easy to follow. I really only intended to sort through my tops today, but once I got started, it made no sense at all to stop at tops, so I just pushed on through all of the clothing categories. In case you are interested, it goes like this: tops, bottoms, things that hang, socks, underwear, bags, accessories, clothes for specific events and shoes. You are supposed to put every item of clothing on the floor, then touch each one individually, deciding if it sparks joy. If it does, keep it. If not, discard it.

My first step was to take out every top I had from t-shirts to button-up shirts to sweaters and pile them on the floor. It was by far the biggest pile. I have a six drawer dresser that had t-shirts in at least four of the drawers. I had a closet full of tops and three space bags full of sweaters. It was overwhelming.

For the most part, though, it was easy to decide what gave me joy and what I was ready to discard. I piled the keepers up on my bed and put the others in garbage bags to take to Goodwill. When I was done with tops, I moved to bottoms and moved down the list. At the end of the process, here's my keep pile:

Osi was a little put out by the activity I had going on. She looked a little frightened by the giant pile of clothes on the bed. And let me also tell you that during this process, I was working my tail off. I was sweaty. I was dismayed and elated all at the same time. I couldn't believe I had so much stuff, but on the other hand, I knew I had way more than any one person could possibly need.

At this point, I had been working on the project for a couple of hours. I was folding my socks when I had an epiphany - I had a boatload of socks. What the hell was I doing with so many socks? There's no way I would wear so damn many socks! That was when I started to get a little shaky and loopy, so I decided to take a quick break. I came downstairs, got a glass of water and had a snack and decided something monumental: I did not need to have so many of the same thing (like socks). I could get rid of some socks even though they were perfectly good socks. I just don't have to have that many! I kept saying it over and over to myself. Remember that the first reason this whole thing got started was the idea of the capsule wardrobe. The capsule doesn't need 50 pairs of socks!

With renewed energy, I came back to my room to finish the task. I got out another garbage bag and filled it with more stuff from the pile that gave me joy. Turns out that some things gave me less joy than others the second time around. Don't get me wrong. I'm still very far from a capsule wardrobe. I still have way more of everything than I need. I feel pretty comfortable saying that I may very well get rid of more things at some point, but the difference is already measurable and significant.

Take a look:

a t-shirt drawer before

after

the closet before

after

bags and jeans

seven bags of stuff for Goodwill plus a couple of bags of garbage

Overall, the process took me a good five hours. I'm mentally tired right now, and physically tired as well. I went through my clothes only - I didn't mess around with any of MT's things. T was here and I think that he may have a session himself on Monday. He has lots of stuff too - so many t-shirts! And like I said, I am far from a capsule wardrobe, but I'm a lot closer than I was at noon today.

And as crazy as it was, I just want to keep getting rid of stuff. The shelves in my closet? I'm cleaning those tomorrow. There are things that belong to MT and I won't touch those, but my stuff is either going away or being stored neatly. I don't need the things. I need the peace of mind that comes from clean clear spaces.

Tomorrow I need to spend some time outside, but I will work on clearing some more space inside, too. I'm only sorry that I'll have to wait for MT to come back to take all these bags to Goodwill. They won't fit in my car!

Talk to you tomorrow...