WOW! How did you do that?! PART 3

Letting Go….It’s A Process

THE TIES THAT BIND

There are several reasons we hold on to stuff and I think I have experienced all of them. The following are things I have gone through and how I overcame them. First of all, emotional attachment. I am very family oriented. I love the history of our family, I love the memories of our family. I love the idea that my grandparents were young once and what they were like then, what they were like at whatever age I currently am. Same for my parents. I love that they had a life before I was ever born. So, I was very attached (and still am to a point) to all things that were theirs. So when my grandmother passed away, I took anything and everything no one else wanted. We were about to move and I didn’t know what I would “need”. Then my mom and dad moved, again, if she was getting rid of something, who was I to say no? After that, my husbands grandmother passed, same problem. Then his parents moved from their home of over 40 yrs to an assisted living. That was his childhood home, how could we pass on anything from there. Then his father passed, and both my parents and his mom moved again. All emotional times. So, we just kept taking stuff whether we had room or if we liked it or not. What happened is my house could not be organized because I had more things than I had places to put them. My basement was a full finished basement, I should have had a nice extra living room down there, but instead I had a storage locker! Half the stuff we had, I had tucked away because either there was no room for it, it was not something I enjoyed looking at, or I did not want it to get ruined, or I had no use for it, but again, it was THEIRS so I must keep it!!!  

            Well it all started with a drawer. A couple of things that I really did not want to keep moving from drawer  to drawer, I really did not have any use for, and I had plenty of other things of hers ( I shall not mention who)  so I threw them out. Wow! The Earth kept on turning, my skin did not burn!  That did not hurt as bad as I thought it would. Found some (ok a lot) of cards from people over the years. But isn’t it rude to throw them out, I mean they did buy them or make them…. Plink…plink ..plink…in the trash they went… I did NOT experience the overwhelming guilt or shame…. Wow! On and on it went until I started getting to the bigger stuff. A suitcase of my grandmothers knitting. A blanket not quite finished, some squares for a quilt… I was never going to finish it, I had no idea how to knit. I was NOT going to pay someone to do it. I have too many finished blankets already. So I found someone at church who did love to knit. I gave her the knitting, suitcase and all. Whether she kept it, I do not know. I like to pretend in my mind she was so excited about it. And then.. I let the thought go. I am more into fabric quilts and blankets and I did keep the ones that she had finished of those. THOSE make me happy and I use them and love them and they will be part of my kids’ memories. Then came the stuff that you hate to get out because you don’t want to ruin it. But… I’m not enjoying them sitting in a box. My kids are not making memories with them in there. They will never hear the stories of them in there. So out they came… to be put into use… Emotional ties keep us from getting rid of so much. However, if there was a fire or a natural disaster, that wiped them all out, would that erase the memory of that loved one? No. In fact, I challenge you, that telling stories and sharing memories of that loved one is more important than their physical things. Keeping the MEMORY of THEM alive!   

SERVING A HIGHER PURPOSE

            We all have done it. We never even came close to growing up in the Depression Era, yet we have heard the saying, Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do, or Do with Out!! If there is a frugal bone in your body, you have looked at an empty butter bowl and thought, “I can’t throw that out, it can be used for something else”. We actually do that with A LOT of things. However, the fact is, we now live in a throw away society. Unless you are planning on having a big meal with lots of left-overs (think holiday meal) then you will likely empty another butter bowl before you ever use that one  your debating on hanging on to. The same goes for other things. There is inevitably something that you are holding on to, not because YOU have use for it, but because you MIGHT one day. I challenge you again, IF that day ever comes, you can either buy another one, or probably find someone else who has one they are not using!! But chances are, that day will never come. If you have not used it in the past 5 years….your not likely to. And if Murphy’s Law comes into play, I would bet chances are you can borrow one from someone else for the ONE time you need it. GET RID OF IT!!

            I had so many craft supplies. I loved the idea of crafts, I loved they way other people’s crafts turned out. I loved collecting supplies, so fun to look at. I even came up with some really good craft ideas…however my supplies went untouched. Either lack of time or talent, often time both, would keep me from using them. If I had the time, my talent left much to be desired. It would frustrate me, even bring me to tears at time, why MY projects did not turn out as cute as my crafty friend’s did (you know who you are! You Martha Stewart of homemaking! Lol) So plain and simple they were not making me happy. They were constant reminders of my failure in crafts! My kids were not so inclined in the craft areas either so they were not being used. I FINALLY had to come to terms with getting rid of them. Painful as it was. I have not missed them…not one day! Plus I freed up room for things I do enjoy, like organizing tools! J If you just think it’s too good to just throw it out, find someone who you know WILL use it and get good use out of it. Make their day! Or sell it! If it’s in good condition and you know it’s something a lot of people would love to have, sell it and make a quick buck. Do not expect to get what you can go to the store and buy it for, people will buy new for that price, and people don’t care what you say it’s worth or what you spent, because it’s only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. Keep the price low so it will go quick and not tempt you into keeping it.  

Oh the money invested, but never used... Gone

Surely I could use these....No but someone else could!

So cute, I loved it, but was never going to use it, so I gave it to someone who would!

 

 

OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND

            Very simply, if you have not looked at or used it in the past year… get rid of it. The only time it will matter to you is while your debating whether or not to get rid of it. Once it’s gone, you will not even think about it. I have not yet, but I plan to hang all my clothes backwards on my railing in my closet. If I wear something, it will be hung back up the right way. After a year anything still hanging backwards, will be donated to Goodwill. I was going to do the ribbon on the clothes but this seemed a lot quicker and easier. If you just discovered something while purging you forgot you had, unless you intend to create a place for it and start putting it to use, get rid of it. No excuses, just do it. You will thank me later. If you have gotten by all this time without it, you will get by even longer after you get rid of it without needing or wanting it. Trust me!!

IF IT IS BROKE, FIX IT OR FORGET IT

            Its bound to happen. You come across something that is broke. You keep planning to fix it. And yet, here it is again, another year and you have not. You have two choices. Stop everything that your doing and fix it. If you really want to keep it, fix it now and get it back into the mix. If you realllly don’t want to stop and do it, you realllly don’t want to keep it. It’s not that important to you. Because I can promise you, no matter how many good intentions you have  not gone back and fixed it for the last several months or years! THROW. IT. AWAY!!!  If it’s something you have to send out to be fixed, take it to your car NOW and take it the next time you get in your car. If you are not willing to do that, it is not important enough. THROW. IT. AWAY!!  

In Closing, I leave you with this. I tell my kids all the time, there are reasons and there are excuses. Reasons are the whys of things. Why they are the way they are. Excuses are the thing you make up to avoid doing what has to be done or needs to be done or even you want to do. Reasons are acceptable; they are a part of life. Excuses just mean you don’t want it bad enough or it’s not important enough to you….yet. When your desperate enough, the excuses will stop no matter what the reasons are.

 

**Next blog will address how to organize what’s left after all the purging.

WOW!! How did you do that? PART 1

This is the first part in a series of my journey. I am willing to share my process of how I regained…wait, that would imply I previously had , ok, so this is my process of  how I finally gained control of things in my life.

So I have been on a journey. A decluttering, organizing, gaining control journey. The things I have been learning and doing the last 5-6 months are not things that have come easily to me. In fact, I have never in my almost 39 years been able to gain control over them. I was never taught HOW to clean a room. How to manage a space, how to organize what I have, or to not overfill a space. I still struggle with time management, I still have dust on my shelves and I still have places to gain control over. However this will share how I have gotten as far as I have ….so far…Some may  help you, some may motivate you, some may make you say, whatever, I’m not doing that or I don’t care… but it is what it is. What it is, is a process. To begin the process you have to understand the root of the problem.

 My parents, like most of us, just told us “clean your room”……ooookkkk,  but I never knew HOW to properly clean it. You would think (like most of us)  DUH no brainer, except, there are many ways to clean a room. It is NOT just put things back where they belong, especially if not everything HAS a place where it belongs. The tactic I took often, even into adulthood is to hide everything, under the bed, shoved into closets, crammed into drawers. Out of sight gave the APPEARANCE of clean and was “good enough”. It passed parental inspection anyway. Therefore now that I am a parent, the exact same pattern I have, my kids have learned! The problem is, when you don’t learn how to clean properly, how to limit the amount of stuff you have, how to organize it, you just keep bringing stuff in (more on that later). So, what do you do when every closet is full, every drawer is overflowing and you don’t dare look under the bed?  Well it starts accumulating where you CAN see it, and it accumulates faster than a cage full of rabbits!

You know how I collected so much stuff? Several ways, one being family members moving…and being normal people, who don’t want to move a bunch of stuff they don’t want, they say  “do you want this?” well being the abnormal person, who you would think lived during the depression by all the things she hoards, thinks, well I might want it at some point in my life and I don’t want to have to buy it so really I would be saving money to take it, so I went ahead and took it, or a family member passing, and you hate to part with their things because, gosh, I must hold onto it, it’s all I have left of them, if it is something I would never want to display or look at too often, that doesn’t matter because  it was THEIRS!. Then you add the high you get from purchasing new items, whether you need them or not, whether you have a place for them or not, whether you really can afford them or not, you like them, therefore they MUST be bought!!  And you never take anything out…. Well, that my friends is how people end up on hoarders! Which, is where I found myself headed. 

OVERWHELMED!

Sound familiar? That is how I felt every day. I was drained of all energy when I looked around. No matter how much time I spent trying to clean and organize, it would look like a hot mess in a day or two. You know why? You can’t put lipstick on a pig and call it a princess! I was never going to get truly organized and clean until I got rid of stuff and I don’t mean a few things here and there. That was not enough! I have lived in 3 houses since being married and multiple apartments. With every move, instead of being like normal people and getting rid of stuff each time, I tended to do the opposite, I would collect more because you never know what you might need in the next place. I would drive by these little homes and wonder HOW people could live in such a tiny home, where did they keep all their stuff? What I never realized was, not everybody has as much STUFF as I did! Can you imagine?!  It was not normal for people to have as much stuff as I kept collecting.

            Anyway, several times friends and family would come over to help me TRY to get organized…. Guess what, it never took, because there was just too much stuff! We are back to the pig and princess theory. Do you know another reason it was never going to work? Because it was a process I HAD to do myself. I HAD to mentally let go, I had to mentally organize. You can not have PHYSICAL clutter without MENTAL clutter. You reduce the physical clutter, you will reduce the mental clutter. More on that later as well. But I was never going to be able to maintain anything until I got to the root of the problem…..letting go. Through out this process, I have been posting on my Facebook my progress. People have asked me how I did it, or what did I do so they can do it too. However often times, if you start to tell someone and they start to immediately give you excuses why they can’t do something, then they are not ready to let go. In my case, I was finally done with the excuses and ready to take action. Can I tell you, every excuse I gave in the past, were really not valid. They were fear and emotional attachment talking. Because I was not ready for the change. I knew it was going to take a lot of work and frankly I was lazy, and I knew I would have to let go of things, that I did not want to let go of yet. Since then, I have probably let go of a small house worth of stuff and do not regret a single thing I have gotten rid of.

SUCCESS!

            I would love to say I have found success. In fact, in a lot of areas I have. But I still have a long way to go. However I have learned so much and am dying to share it with my family and friends. This has been something that has affected every aspect of my life. My husband and kids think I am crazy or obsessed. They may be right. I tend to give things 100% or nothing at all. Some would say, obsessed or no interest at all, tomato tomaaaato! Haha What I do know is, I am finally on my way to being the very person I have dreamt about. I have a very long road ahead but I know now, after everything I have already accomplished, it’s possible. I now know for fact, that as long as you start, you have a chance. No matter how many times you fail, as long as you keep trying, you CAN get there, it IS possible and every other cliché’ I hated before. I know what looked way more than I could handle became “done” one day, one step, one room, one closet, one drawer at a time. I do not pretend to have it all figured out, I do know I am adjusting the process everyday. If something doesn’t seem to be working, I adjust it. There is no law, no rule, nobody to say if it’s not working, you can’t change it. In fact there are no rules at all, only what works and what doesn’t. I can tell you a lot of ways that worked ….for ME and a lot of ways that didn’t. But they may not be the same for you. This is my journey, and the adventures I have taken. I hope I can inspire you to create your own! I am not a professional blogger, I don’t’ even have very many followers, it’s never been about that for me. I don’t want nor need that pressure. My blogs have been about sharing with family and friends what’s going on in my life. It’s also my way of holding onto memories for my kids. To look back and see what their ol’ mom thought and did. So if you don’t like it, don’t read it and if you do, I would love to hear it and be encouraged if I have helped you at all. In the next blog, I will share how I FINALLY got started. If you need to finally get started, I hope it will encourage and inspire you to finally do that!

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas Edison