As far as packrattery is concerned, clothing has always been my worst enemy. My closet was overflowing with shirts and pants I had never worn, worn once…you know the story.
Practically, it's simple to get rid of stuff; you pick it up, carry it outside, and drop it in the trash. Done! But emotions, insecurity, and unhealthy attachment can turn something simple into something painful and daunting.
I came up with a great trick that made getting rid of about 80% of my clothes simple and pain-free! It turns out that simply sorting my clothes into categories made all the difference…I'll explain how…
For me, the first half of my closet was easy to get rid of. These were the clothes in boxes that I hadn't opened in a year or three and clothes that I thought were plain ugly. The second half was another story.
I used all the common excuses to justify holding onto all this fabric:
- "one day I'll lose an unrealistic amount of weight and this will fit me"
- "this is torn, but someday I'll fix it"
- and even "this doesn't look nice on ME, but I think it looks great in my closet!"
When I went through my big purge, part of me wanted to just chuck everything out that I hadn't touched in a year…that would have been easiest, but my emotions got in the way, and I needed a crutch. What I did was organize my clothes into piles based on how I felt about them. This allowed me to see how large of percentage of my clothes received such a small percentage of love from me, and made it simple to purge from the bottom up until I was left with clothes that mattered to me.
For your killer-closet-purging, you might sort them differently, but what I did was to organize my pants, shirts, skirts, jackets, etc into these categories:
- love and wear
- like and wear
- need to lose a bit of weight for
- need to lose an unrealistic amount of weight for
- need to alter, sew, fix, etc
I even made a tally chart while I sorted and stacked them up…I wish I had taken a picture of it, but it looked something like this:
| Love | Like | Lose a bit | Lose a lot | Project | |
| Shirts | III | ||||
| Pants | III | II |
You get the idea…
What this forced me to do though was see how disproportionate my closet was! I had almost twice as many shirts I didn't feel comfortable in as shirts I could wear right now. Before, when they were all hanging up, in piles, and stuffed in boxes, it wasn't so obvious because I'd see a shirt, think "maybe someday" and pass on. But stacked together and tallied up, it became incredibly easy to let things go.
Ideally, at this point, everything you can't fit into right now, and everything you don't actively wear would get tossed. I wasn't so strong…what I did was allow myself a certain number of things to keep from piles that should have been tossed out immediately.
This I think is another great trick if fear is holding you back. I told myself that I could keep 6 "lose a bit shirts" and 3 "lose a lot." So I sorted them by which I liked most, and kept my favorite 6.
A week later though, I went back, threw away the rest of the "lose a lot" clothes, and kept a few of my favorite "lose a bits."
In the end, I wound up dragging over 10 paper grocery bags full of clothes to Value Village to donate…and I don't regret or miss a single piece of clothing!
] chloe [
