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Mar

13

Inbox Clips #1: How do I deal with overwhelm when facing clutter attached to memories?

I have recently been receiving some emails and comments asking questions of me regarding the subjects I discuss on my blog: simplicity, cutter, being frugal, etc..

I’d love to respond to these questions in a way that can help others as well. Just as Trent at The Simple Dollar recently started doing, I will have an open mailbox post regularly. Whether this will be weekly or every day is completely up to me and dependent on how many questions I get While I don’t get anything near the amount of emails and comments that Trent does, I’d still like to do it.

I am going to call this “WWSD,” or What Would Shanti Do? Because that’s generally what the questions are asking
So, to start off this series… bakelite doorbell asked:

Do you have any ideas on dealing with the feeling of overwhelm when facing clutter? For example opening a box of collected items that conjure up memories. When I do that I get lost in thought and can’t focus on sorting through the junk. Can’t make decisions when overwhelmed so I end up keeping it all.

First of all, I totally sympathize with you. I have had this same problem for a while. Sometime when I was very young I started a “memory box” with an old chocolates sampler box. I kept little things that were important to me - little tokens of my life - inside. By middle school I had two boxes and by high school I had so much that I bought a trunk to keep it all in. I have carted around this trunk with me for years.

In January I decided to go through the box. Initially, there was nothing to get rid of! I mean, everything that was in there had significance to me - old letters, home videos, notes from friends and boyfriends, souvenirs from trips, old wood-shop projects, art projects, papers I’d written for school - you name it, I had it representing my past in this huge trunk.

You may have a similar space where you keep memory-infused things, or they may be throughout your entire home. I did manage to go though the box and throw away three (yes, three!) garbage and recycle bags full of stuff. You can too! It’s a matter of first addressing the things as just “stuff,” and then taking time to really feel through the things, second. Here’s how I did it.

Baby Steps

When I started I was completely at a loss. I knew that I didn’t need all this stuff (emotionally, it was weighing me down, and I knew it), but I didn’t know where to start. I opened the trunk and then left it there, open, for two days without doing anything. I finally got up the energy and desire to go through it all and get rid of that which I didn’t need.

1. Set your sights small. Organize and de-clutter one thing at a time. Your closet, your desk, your kitchen cupboards. There is no need to do the whole office, or the whole kitchen. Do ONE small, small place.

2. Don’t feel like you have to decide what you will keep right NOW. When cleaning out my memory trunk, I started by sorting the stuff, rather than deciding to part with any of it. By getting the things into comprehensive piles, I could then deal with one pile at a time.

3. Sort without mulling. I sorted my piles without thinking about the memories and without cooing over things I’d forgotten about. Avoiding attachment in the process of sorting made doing it a lot easier. While it’s hard to just let go and sort the stuff like you would dishes, you must do it this way. If you get drawn into the memories, the project will be a huge time-suck and you’ll get nowhere.

I put all the cards in one place, all the notes in another. I made over two dozen piles: cards, letters, notes, school projects, wood-shop projects, art, trinkets, stuffed animals, journals and diaries, photo albums, yearbooks, memorabilia (clothing, silly things, pom-poms, etc.) and so forth. If you are sorting through your entire home, make a decision to allow your place to get cluttered with piles. Take out ALL the stuff you want to get rid of and sort it into piles, nothing more, nothing less.

4. Go through the piles one by one, piece by piece. If you are doing your whole house at once, this may take you over a week, but it doesn’t have to. This all depends on your emotional readiness to part with that which you don’t need anymore. Go through each thing. Ask yourself if the thing is really bringing you any joy. Let this be the time you linger over the different objects and let yourself remember. Personally, I knew I was keeping all of the yearbooks, diaries, and videos. So those were put back into the trunk. Everything else had to be sorted.

5. Let go and be done. This is far easier said than done. But just make the piles. Do it. Examine each thing. Have a parting ceremony with the thing. Allow yourself to remember your past without needing the thing, and tell yourself that it will be okay without this thing in your home. Slowly, you will find the things that really have no importance to you. When going through the mass of birthday, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, graduation, and anniversary cards, I found that under a microscope, most of these didn’t mean a thing to me. But I couldn’t have just thrown away the lot of them - I had to go through each one. HONESTLY ask yourself about each item. The cards took me about an hour to sort, and I ended up keeping about 15 and throwing the rest away.

6. Move forward. Once you’ve cleaned out one sub-section of one sub-section of one place in your space, move on to the next. With teeny, incremental steps, you will be able to face your overwhelm and get the junk out of your life. I suggest that you try and bring nothing new into your home while you’re doing the cleanse because that will only add to your mental stress.

Extra thoughts? After sorting through everything, I organized further. I put all my journals in chronological order so they would be easily accessible. I put all of my art into an accordion file and organized my videos by year. I put all of my notes into one box, and my cards and letters into another. I still have all my photo albums together on a “to do” shelf because I’d like to organize them as well and get rid of over half the pictures.

If I didn’t answer your question fully, let me know! I think that with a lot of patience and will, you can do this. You need to be brutal in evaluating your stuff, but in order to even get started you need to take it one little step at a time.

Have a question? Comment, or email me and I’ll make another post