Answered a question 3/13/2010 at 9:11 am
Hanging on to stuff isn't just about older people, though. Don't you still have a pair of jeans or slinky dress in the back of the closet that 'someday' you'll fit back into?
...Read MoreHanging on to stuff isn't just about older people, though. Don't you still have a pair of jeans or slinky dress in the back of the closet that 'someday' you'll fit back into?
I've come to see it's about hanging on to the person they were, the dreams they had. (Don Aslett, the famous writer on decluttering and home cleaning, has a lot to say about how anyone at any age is susceptible to this mental trap.) If the piles of references and drafts from his dissertation are gone, did he really get that degree? If her boxes of costume jewelry are empty, did she really used to dress up glamorously and host great dinner parties? Even if the whatever hasn't been touched in years, just knowing it's there can be comforting.
My dad resisted mightily when my mom started decluttering by selling books they'd reviewed years earlier (and never read again) on Amazon, and would indignantly rescue old desk lamps from the thrift shop donation box in the garage and put them back on a shelf. It was much less stressful in the end to get his buy-in, however much persuasion it took, rather than have him suspiciously poking through boxes thinking it was only his stuff being culled. Another way we got buy-in was to encourage him to visit the charity we primarily benefited, which was the local humane society (he has always loved his cats and dogs). Days when the donation went to their thrift shop, we'd stop and play with the cats at the shelter first.
After moving them across country to be closer to us in WA, and downsizing their home by half, we have a lot of frustrating but really very sad conversations about 'I guess you had to get rid of lots of my things' -- when in all honesty, lots of his books and things are still just in boxes in storage, cos they don't fit in the house... Don't yet have the answer to that issue, except to set up shelves in the storage space and unpack it all so he can visit it there!
But that revealed another interesting aspect of keeping stuff: for him, having everything on the same shelves it had been on for years was a memory aid: he has been much more likely to be confused now, because everything is arranged just enough differently in the new house.
Hope this helps a little bit. My experiences with my folks, and friends' parents, have made me determined to do a better job decluttering my own life, now...