I have a dream. My dream is to de-clutter my life. Mainly my house. I feel as though stuff has just been accumulating since the latter days of my pregnancy. Our spare bedroom is a mess, it’s literally become the place things go to die in our house. I don’t dare open the closet in there. I think it’s been years since I’ve seen what we have stashed away, and that tells me that it’s basically a closet full of things we don’t need. We also have a child on the verge of crawling, and basically getting into everything. When you see your house through you babies eyes, the glass candle holder on the table and the stack of crap in the corner become death traps.
I have this grace period between my nanny starting and when my freelance work will ramp up. A week or two, maybe three if I’m really lucky, to get an entire years worth of ‘to dos’ done. I figured if I blog about it there would be some accountability and I might use this free time wisely…rather than say, going and getting my nails done and a massage – or even worse, shopping for more stuff.
In addition to the random tchotchkes that are making me crazy, I have collections of things. I have this bad habit of getting one thing, really liking it, and then wanting to get my hands on the same thing in 20 different colors. This collection issue of mine spans from items such as designer handbags to MAC eye shadows to Lularoe leggings to candle holders to Birkenstocks. And yes, it’s usually brand specific. For example, I had a love affair with Essie nail polish, so everytime I was at Walgreens I would buy a new bottle. I have 10 variations of the same pink, 5 of the same beige, and 7 of the same red.
We still have every CD we’ve ever purchased, even those CDs from before we were a we. We cleared them off the rack in our living room awhile back and put them into a box which is now sitting in the living room probably taking up more space than the actual CD shelf did in the first place. The idea was to go through them and get rid of the ones we don’t want, but that hasn’t happened yet, and I believe its due to my husband’s inability to part with anything. Well, let me rephrase, he’s fine if I want to part with my O-Town CD, but heaven forbid he let’s go of the Limp Bizkit album he bought that summer it was cool. And I’m not saying get rid of the music. Put it on the computer if you really think you are going to get down with the Nookie sometime again. I’d just like to free up a little more space, and I feel the cloud is a great place for Fred Durst.
Perhaps the old eyeshadows, the baseball hats from vacations past, the 4 stacks of shot glasses, the huge stack of puzzles in the closet are a reminder of our past life. Before we were in our 30s, before we had a baby. As I look at my glorious collection of MAC eye shadow I think to myself, I’m 36 years old, will I ever do a smoky eye with 4 different color eye shadows again? And if I do, the occasion would be so rare that I don’t think I need 100 different color combination options. Maybe someday we’ll have time to do a puzzle, or read back issues of our favorite magazine, or we might throw on that old baseball hat. But does it make sense to keep any of it on the chance you might do it someday? And, if you haven’t worn that hat in 10 years, why would you start now? Let’s hope my husband doesn’t really want to relive terrible 90s white boy pop-rap.
So, I’m going to part with my collections. Or at least pair them down to a manageable, more organized number.(Don’t worry, I won’t get rid of my designer handbags. They will be waiting for me when I’m done with the diaper bag.) Maybe I’ll actually use up a whole bottle of pale pink nail polish before I go buy another similar but different color, or actually wear out a pair of Birks before I get a new one. And I’m going to try harder to not buy one of every color, unless I really, really, really, really need it or will use it. They say less clutter equals less stress, right? We’ll see.