Just throw it all out
I’ve been throwing things away. Notebooks, sticker sheets, bowls, worn-out socks, clothes I still like, shoes I sometimes wear. Every morning I check my five desk drawers and think: What goes? What stays? Then I move onto my closet, and then the bathroom, and then repeat. Why don’t you want these? My roommates ask, holding up a humidifier or stack of books. I’m just tired of looking at them, I say, which is as good of an answer as I can come up with.
The other day I calculated that I own 102 items of clothing, including shoes. Is that a lot? A little? Does it matter? I am trying to make sense of this new compulsion. According to r/Minimalism that is a fine number, so-so. According to r/FemaleFashionAdvice that is considerably lower than the average fashion-conscious woman. I was hoping this number would mean something but instead it simply means that all day, every day, I’ve been thinking about the objects that make up my life.
Before this compulsion started, to throw away, I had seen all of these items in my apartment, over, and over, and over, in bad news and in worse news, in one season and the next, in one apartment and then another. Every morning I would open my closet and say, “Not today, Silk Shirt,” and instead would pick out Beige Fleece Pullover or Gray Nike Zip-Up. Eventually, when the days were short and dark, I no longer had the energy to confront that I was not wearing Silk Shirt, had not for many months, and perhaps would not ever again. When I thought of Silk Shirt, I pictured the Before Times, and I would try to picture the After Times, and in those times, the After ones, I couldn’t see myself wearing Silk Shirt or even Mesh Long Sleeve. Maybe I was naked. Maybe I was wearing a football jersey. But never anything from Before.
Last week, The Cut’s Emilia Petrarca wrote an article titled “What Do We Do With Bad Clothing Memories?” about the clothes she owns that have been spiritually and/or aurally tainted by this past year, offering a kind of explanation for this desire to purge. She planned to wear her vintage Prada skirt on her birthday this year (as we all were) before remembering that she had last worn it, at the beginning of the pandemic, to a funeral. “I pulled it out of my closet [and] I remembered… the damp pool of snot in my face mask. My block heels sinking into the grass at the cemetery… Time has been such a slippery thing this year. I guess I did what a lot of people probably did, which is take all the bad memories and shove them into the back of the metaphorical closet that is my mind.”
But my clothes, and all of the seemingly innocent items in my apartment, don’t bring any distinct memories to mind. There’s just: Mug I Use A Lot and Desk Chair From Craigslist, both of which are now ambiently bad, for some reason. These kinds of objects (the ones I haven’t yet gotten rid of) became, and are still, the backdrop of my pandemic life, a kind of setting and stage for me to perform my daily, miserable little tasks. They haven’t been tainted by any particular pandemic memory — I haven’t worn Silk Shirt in over a year — but instead by the very passage of time that’s been sickened and slowed. I picture it like water poured over cloth, a kind of seeping. All day and night they drip, and drop.
Not all items do this, miraculously. My yoga mat doesn’t bother me. Neither does my Kendall x Kylie Cosmetics eyeshadow palette, that I’ve used maybe three times, even though it should. The objects I use and see most often to act out my new life indoors — like aforementioned Mug I Use A Lot and Desk Chair From Craigslist — are the worst offenders; reminders, incessant reminders, of a grief-riddled year.
Petrarca still plans to wear her Prada skirt on her birthday, but I am on my fourth garbage bag and sixth Poshmark and/or Depop sale. Each time I discard, I dismantle; I feel as though my apartment, and therefore my life, have gotten larger. To toss a sweater or winter glove into the donate pile is an act of wringing, a release of the grief that had pooled there.
There are, of course, some items I can’t discard or donate because I need them, or don’t have the money to replace them. But I am trying to live with less, and feel gratitude for the items that have remained, miraculously, untarnished. My bedroom is certainly not empty, but it is now much emptier. It is larger and brighter. I have extra closet space. My bookshelf is only half-full and Silk Shirt is gone. I’ve been reading a lot of e-books on minimalism lately (annoying sentence) but one example that minimalists often give to declutterers is to think of those who have lost all of their possessions in a house fire. They’re able to survive without any of their original belongings, they say, meaning: You’ll survive. But this past year has felt a bit like moving into a house after the fire. Our belongings — work clothes, travel mugs, going-out tops — are now blackened, useless. What then? I say burn it all down. Start again.
