It all started with bed bugs.
My husband Casey and I had just gotten our apartment “perfect.”
All the pictures were hung, everything had a home, and it finally looked like
we were real-live adults. And then I started getting eaten alive by something,
which we later diagnosed as bed bugs.
Thankfully the college I attend and we work for hired an exterminator,
but we had to wash every single soft, fabric item in our entire home in hot
water to kill the bugs. As we shoved our lives into trash bags, I was
horrified. The process was grueling and worst of all, embarrassing. How had two
singles who had previously occupied 10x10 rooms have so much stuff? How did I
have SO MANY CLOTHES?
I blame that partially on the fact I haven’t grown since the
8th grade. For the past 7 years, every item of clothing I’ve
purchased has fit, and continues to fit, so I find it harder to donate them. My
mother and I are also bargain-hunters (and I love clothes and ask for them for
Christmas and birthdays) so I have a larger number of items than I might have
if we bought everything full-price. That, however, was no excuse for the piles
of clothing occupying our living room floor after the bed-bug debacle.
Perhaps the best part of the entire incident was that I
needed to live out of one trash bag full of clothes for the whole month of
exterminating, or risk needing to re-wash all those bags again. I realized after
that month that I hardly missed most of the clothes that had stayed packed.
During the bed bug fiasco, my mom had been reading about
KonMari, this Japanese-style cleaning method that basically boils down to
throwing/donating anything that no longer brings you joy. Particularly, getting
rid of anything that you keep out of guilt. I didn’t read the KonMari book myself, but
that concept was revolutionary! A lot of times we keep clothes because we spent
money on them, someone else spent money on them, we think we might fit into
them again someday, we think we should wear a certain style, etc. etc.
Those are bad reasons to keep clothes.
Instead, only keep clothes you love to wear. And what I
liked most of all was that this wasn’t a minimalist/capsule wardrobe plan. I
always felt guilty reading those blog posts, because I LOVE DRESSES. And those
posts always say you should have one, maybe two dresses. Well that’s great,
unless you wear dresses 85% of the time. KonMari allows you to keep what you
love, and what you love is different for everybody.
So today I went through my entire wardrobe and donated
everything that didn’t bring me joy – and cut my closet in half.
See my next post for just how it went down!
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