The Purge

2020 – No goals. Just more effort. I’ve been trying to do less complaining (which is not my thing) and put more effort into the life I want to curate with myself. I was laying around the first week of January and out of the blue decided to clean out old clothes out of my closet. It wasn’t super random. It was an effort to minimize the amount of laundry I was doing DAILY so that I could reclaim my time! (That never gets old!)

For some reason on a random Tuesday night, I decided at 9 pm that I wanted to go through the clothes that my family of four has either outgrown or honestly just don’t need in an effort to minimize the scale of laundry I was doing. I would spend literally entire weekends washing and folding clothes. What started out as a quick run-through of clothes turned into a 4-day event. I was on a roll. I got rid of t-shirts that I don’t ever wear. (I don’t even like wearing t-shirts so why did I have over 50 of them clogging up my drawers?

Then it became a mission. I purged old sheets, old towels, missing socks, too little clothes, random dolls laying around the house. I couldn’t stop. I needed order. I needed less. The entire time I was purging old pillowcases, sets upon sets of “extra” sheets, I couldn’t figure out why I needed most of it. Why did I have over 60 towels in the house? What started as a revamp of my laundering practices turned into a mission to downsize my personal wardrobe by half and to add visual space to my home.

4 days, 7 donation bags, 4 heavy trash bags later, I finished. I stood in the center of each room and smiled at the closets that are now all perfectly curated and not overstuffed with clothes hanging in between crevices. I peeked into the linen closets which now only held 4 sets of towel sets, (one for each person in the house) and a guest set. There weren’t any bulging sheet sets that were balled up in the corner because there wasn’t any space.

That’s when I realized that I may very well be heading toward the life of a minimalist. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t something that I had been contemplating. It was literally just a feeling. A feeling that there was too much in the way. Literally and metaphorically. And I had to get it out of the way.

It’s been freeing. My house feels lighter. It’s February now and I can honestly say that I don’t regret a single thing that I got rid of during the purge. The more I purged, the more I started to realize that I was holding on to things (maybe from conditioning to have more) so that I can say that I had it “just in case.” Just in case of what though?

This random act of getting rid of things that no longer serve me or my family or legacy wasn’t so random after all. It has really been the catalyst for me to move things out of the way that no longer serve me. In the end, it was all just stuff. Usually, when I have purged in the past, it was always with the mentality to make room for “new” stuff. For some reason, this isn’t that. Will I buy more clothes? Of course. I’m not going all “granola” all of a sudden.

But now when I do buy something, it will be for the purpose of enjoying what I do have and not waiting for something special or an emergency to use it. Have you ever just felt like there’s just too much stuff weighing you down? I would love to hear about it. It can’t be just me.

Oh and that laundry, my new laundry strategy has already allowed me to enjoy an entire weekend without more than 15 minutes of folding. It’s been life-changing. I realized in this process that my thoughts about lifestyle are changing. It’s no longer just about buying that “new thing” or having the latest. It’s about having free time to invest in yourself and your family. That’s the real PLUG! Now let’s see what epiphany the new month brings!