The Great House Purge continues marching ever onward. I've fallen into a sort of fugue state where it feels like all I do is tidy and toss, only to come back the next week and see that no, actually, I haven't gotten rid of anything in several months.
September had the last camping trip of the summer and though I brought some bags of old papers in case my fancies were tickled, I didn't end up going through anything and so just hauled it all straight home. But! Last week I did bring a stack of books to a local used bookstore to trade in for store credit, but somehow couldn't get myself to bring in the nerd trinkets caked in dust that I also have been meaning to send pictures of for months. So, as usual, the cleaning is flip-flopping between completely manageable and normal and totally unreasonable.
But the real kicker: I had to root around in my office closet for something, which included moving and opening some of the bins I have in there, and honestly? There's just not that much stuff in there.
Cue, "Is this growth?" Am I actually getting rid of stuff or did I just hallucinate bins that were never there?
One of the huge sources of paralysis for me with all of the paper junk is the sense that it's never ending, that starting or even completing a little bit is pointless because another six stacks will fill the space left by whatever I successfully did move on (recycled paper, donated or gave away physical things, etc.) I just shove things into the Office Closet and shut the door, letting it all slumber for another however many weeks until I need to brave it again.
So when I went through the closet and found what I needed quickly (granted, bent over at an odd angle because of all of the "to donate" junk in front of the closet), it felt almost fake, like I had hidden the real mess in some secret closet that I forgot about.*
When I was a kid, my dad taught me the engineer's trick to counting up the jellybeans in one of those "Guess How Many" jars: you count the ones on the bottom, then multiply that number by the (rough) number of beans running in a vertical up the side.
The idea is to spare you the otherwise inevitable result of being wildly under or over in your guesstimate, to get at least somewhat close using the power of mental math.
The closet(s) and bins are starting to feel like those jellybean jars, where the number swings between wildly unmanageable vs acceptable/ with room for more stuff if I needed to. Now, though, the trick is to find the mental math behind it all, to learn to "see" it not as an exact number on a to-do list, not at this point, but how I can get close to see better what steps I need to take to make things actually, unquestionably manageable.
All this and I'm really regretting the downsizing of my apartment space that I did summer 2024. The idea was that the smaller space would help me to focus on getting rid of more stuff (and to save on rent a little, since the space I was coming from was slightly too large.) Well, more unexpected boxes from my parents' place came after that and thus the storage unit was adopted. At least that old place had more closets so that the needs-to-be-stored storage unit stuff (like the aforementioned out-of-season camping gear) could at least spare me the $88/month (which might've been rolled over into how crazy difficult it was to heat the place, but who knows).
Armload of books to trade in for store credit (which was worth exactly one book)
One full garbage bag of clothing to another donation drop-off
A bunch of worn pairs of jeans for the "Blue Jeans Go Green" campaign, boxed and ready for shipping
In progress: a Trashie "Take Back Bag" for getting rid of more worn clothing that needs recycling, not donation
A certificate for a local writing contest I entered and got 2nd place in in the 8th grade, for a story I wrote about Leonardo DaVinci's teenage girl apprentice
*The hidden closet is in the same dimension as the hidden student loan account that both I and the government must not know about. Because those numbers aren't actually supposed to go down, right???