Making the move to a clutter-free life
Those old trousers aren't 'vintage' and you don't 'need' that pile of magazines. Reformed hoarder Declan Cashin says a move is the time to let go of 'stuff'
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A general view inside Elle Magazine fashion director and Project Runway judge Nina Garcia closet in Garcia's midtown NY apartment.
Friday September 26 2008
Right now, I'm slap-bang in the middle of moving apartments for the sixth time in as many years and, for the first time ever in my entire life, the actual process of finding a place to live has been the easiest part of the move.
My snazzy new digs landed in my lap; the move-in date synchronised perfectly with the end of my current lease; I'm good friends with the other guy living there, and it's near everything and everyone I need in my day-to-day life.
The difficulty facing me this time round is that I have finally decided to confront something I have been avoiding for many years: I have to conquer my hoarding addiction.
I'm discovering that, despite all that to-ing and fro-ing between places over the past half-decade, I've never properly culled my mountain of possessions. Instead, I've just created a lot of work for myself and the unlucky slave labour I recruited for each move by hauling all this stuff around with me each time.
And boy is there a lot of stuff. Take clothes, for example. My floor-drobe (did I mention that I'm not that tidy either?) houses probably my biggest hoarding shame. I'm finding garments in there that I haven't worn since college, either because they've gotten too small for me (it couldn't possibly be that I've gotten too big for them), or because they are so hideous that only an 18-year-old bumpkin student living on 20 old Irish punts a month would be caught dead in them.
My guiding rule this time out is: if I haven't worn it since I moved last time, then it's getting tossed. I've been surprisingly faithful to that guiding maxim, ignoring that little voice in my head that says: "Hey, those X-Works jeans and boot runners could be considered vintage next week, hang onto them!"
Now I have hardly any clothes left. When you brutally strip down your closet as I just have, you realise how much you rely on a few core looks day in, day out. I think a visit to Dundrum Town Centre is badly required (that's what returning deposits are for).
The next onerous task at hand is tackling what I call the 'home entertainment' section of my hoard. I have piles of books whose pages are growing yellow from age but whose spines have yet to be cracked. I think it's fair to assume that if I haven't read a book within, say, three years of buying it, then it's going into the Oxfam bag.
Magazines and newspapers also constitute another ridiculous stash in my room. I still have piles of newspapers from major events in my lifetime such as 9/11 and the Iraqi invasion, thinking that they would come in handy at some point in my career. It's time for them to go: besides, why have them clutter up my room, when they can be preserved forever in that most magnificent and limitless of hoarding spaces: the internet.
The only stash I refuse to whittle down is my DVD collection. Those babies are for the ages -- or at least until the foot soldiers of the Blu-Ray revolution storm the barricades, which I expect should be happening any day now.
Yet, despite my new-found de-cluttering prowess, it still pains me every time another black sack is thrown into the recycling bin. Sorting through this stuff is turning out to be emotionally draining: a slogan on an old T-shirt was enough to plunge me into a teary-eyed, nostalgic retrospective, replete with the time-specific soundtrack to accompany the mental images.
It's turning into a constant struggle between reeling in the years and getting real, and for now I'm doing my best to stick to the latter category. Besides, all that freed-up space I have in my spanking new closets is just crying out to be filled with a new hoard of junk in the very near future.
I can't wait to start.
- Declan Cashin
