In previous posts, I expressed disagreement with the whole idea of having to purge all your belongings according to some arbitrary rule – like if you haven’t worn it in a season, dump it. I believed that this would just feed into the vicious loop of the fast fashion industry, and all the terrible social and environmental consequences it has. However, I’ve come to realize another aspect of the purging that I do seem to be able to relate to.
I haven’t changed my stance fully. But I’ve come to recognize purging to be possibly a useful initative to take in some cases – not necessarily for the sake of simply cleaning up your closet, but more for the sake of becoming conscious of your own lifestyle, including consumption, decision-making, and how your possesions influence your life in general.
What do I mean by all this. Well, in the past year, I have fairly rarely purchased clothes in a shop. That wasn’t a deliberate decision, and it’s not super shocking either, as I just genuinely don’t enjoy shopping too much on the one hand, and on the other hand, I have been regularly attending clothes swap events – which, believe it or not, actually became my primary source for new clothing. I am actually very happy and proud of this – not only because it’s ecologically and financially absolutely awesome, but also because I’ve come to really love some items and the gatherings themselves, so it’s been really fun to attend these events every couple of months.
However, along with it came a problem I would have never anticipated. Being exposed regularly to a vast supply of free clothes, surrounded by friends or friendly strangers saying ‘wow that looks great on you’ snowballed into a situation where I started to have more clothes than I’ve ever purposefully owned. I would go to these events with 2-3 IKEA bags stuffed with things I deemed discardables, and come back with exactly the same amount – of ‘okay’ stuff.
Because, when stuff is for free, it’s much easier to be like ‘oh, well, I’m not sure, but I’ll take it anyway and see, and I’ll just bring it back next time if I figure it doesn’t work.’ Well, as it turns out, this is something I have been doing fairly often at these swaps- I shop so rarely, that in these gatherings I would often just say ‘yes’ to clothes that I would normally not spend money on – simply because I can, because it costs nothing to do so.
It hasn’t gotten to cosmic proportions just yet – my clothes still fit into my wardrobe, but I’ve noticed an increasing amount of clothing I don’t really wear or need. And I’m slowly starting to realize, that the clutter is affecting me – it’s cluttering my life too. Frankly, it’s plain annoying. And it is in this moment, that I welcome the idea of the purging – for my own peace of mind.
I do want to stress here though, that for me the idea of purging is a process about becoming conscious in my decision-making. Not just for the discarding itself, but also for anything new I obtain or let into my life.
Today, I spent 2 hours just going through my dresses, shoes and pants – and I ended up filling 3 pretty huge bags of things that I will dispose of – NOT in the trash, but either by giving it to friends, or at a clothes swap (the one with my friends won’t be until spring, but I just found a publicly organized one on Facebook close to my house, it will be next week, how convenient!).
For each and everyitem, I thought back as to why and how I got that piece of clothing, how I felt about it, and whether I would still want to own it. Mind you, I didn’t only ask myself, ‘would I ever wear this again?’, because more often than not, I could imagine a scenario, in which I would. Once, in 10 years, for sure. But just because there is a slim chance you might end up using something very rarely, doesn’t mean you actually *really* need it – and I feel like that’s a huge distinction to make about each and every of our possessions. Which is exactly what I attempted today, looking at everything, one-by-one.
I’m hoping, that with this exercise, I will gain more knowledge on who I am, what I like, want and need in my life – and hence be also better at not letting myself get cluttered again with just ‘things’, things that I don’t want or need, but for which I simply have the luxury of being able to obtain and ‘have’ it.
Honestly, it was a super tiring process. But I do feel the psychological effect of it already – having cleared some of the clutter has cleared some space in my mind too.
Maybe this is exactly why and how purging was so advocated for by folks, and I just never understood because in the past 10 years I moved so often I couldn’t afford to have much stuff piling up, so maybe I just have not bought/owned enough clothes to comprehend the real purging vibe.
So do purge, but do it mindfully – not so that you can fill up the empty space with more new stuff you don’t need, but so that you can mindfully create yourself the space you want and need, filled with the only items that do bring you happiness.
step-by-step sustainability 