If you read my last article, you know that I was supposed to start my tidying journey today. That didn’t happen. Don’t worry though, it’s not as bad as it sounds. I actually started yesterday when I got home from work. Well, actually, after resting first. I started my period yesterday, which really sucked, but it meant that I stayed in bed for a good three or four hours trying to survive through the pain of being a woman. After that whole deal, when I was feeling better, I started tidying with my clothes. This took me probably five hours or a little less and included the deciding of what to keep, hanging up clothes that needed to be hanged, and folding the clothes that needed to be folded. I really wish I took pictures, but perhaps in the future I will remember to do that.
Here’s the state my clothes were in at the start: I had probably thirty to forty shirts, ten dresses, thirteen jackets, twenty pants, one skirt, eleven scarves, thirty pairs of socks, twenty pairs of underwear, and ten pairs of shoes. I also had something like eleven bags also. Those are not exact numbers. Those are honestly just guesses. And I was totally cool with the thirty shirt thing because I would really like to have ten of each kind of shirt (tank tops, t-shirt, long sleeve, etc.) for variety during the different seasons and also because I usually just wear a regular shirt to bed every night, but a different regular shirt every night. So that’s two shirts a day and in seven days, that’s technically fourteen shirts, which would be roughly half the shirts I own. All of my shirts were hung up, my jackets were mostly hung up, but all in different places, my bags were all stuffed behind my shirts in the closet, my pants took up two drawers, and I had many pairs of socks and underwear that I no longer use or that were broken.
Now, I have honestly no idea how many of what kind of clothes I have and it doesn’t matter to me. My dresses are still hanging up in the closet, as are my more flowy shirts, my heavy knitted sweaters, and some blouses and button-up shirts that would wrinkle if they were folded. Everything else–and I do mean everything (except for my shoes and bags)–are all folded nicely and placed inside my dresser. The top drawer is what it’s always been: bras, underwear, and socks. But now I’ve also included my two pairs of tights (I used to have six) and the scarves that remain. The second drawer is now where all my nicely folded shirts are, and the third drawer is now where my pants reside. It’s going to take some getting used to, but I’m liking the transformation already.
Since I started this around 3pm yesterday and it took nearly five hours, I decided to call it a day, watched a couple of movies, and then went to bed very late. All in all, it was a very successful day. I got rid of trash bags of clothes, but I still felt like I had a lot. All of the things I kept do bring me joy though. I feel like I didn’t get rid of a lot, but I love everything I have. And if, at some point, I ever decide that I don’t love a shirt or a pair of pants to the point where they spark joy anymore, I will thank them for their time with me and let them go. That’s what this whole process is about, right? Finding what sparks joy and getting rid of the rest.
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