My Closet Called My Bluff
On taking my own advice, ninety minutes at a time
Sunday morning. Mabel was out in the driveway with her new car, plugging in her phone, rearranging the things in the console, learning where the buttons live. She picked this car out herself, and she is, frankly, in love with it. It will be her second girlfriend going forward, and it will also be cleaner than my closet.
Which, as it happens, is the subject of today’s essay.
I was packing for the beach. I needed a few things from the dresser, opened the top drawer, and started pulling things out to find what I actually wanted to bring to Florida. The problem revealed itself quickly. The drawer was mostly things that no longer fit, things that were ragged, things I had not reached for in a year and would not reach for this week either. I was not packing. I was excavating.
I shut the drawer, sat down on the bed, and asked myself, with some irritation, why I had not dealt with this yet.
I wrote an essay back in January called The Audacity of Feeling Good, about clearing out the cold-weather clothes that no longer fit after my weight loss, and about what it meant to let myself enjoy the body I now live in. I felt at the time like I had done the work. And I had, for that pile. But anyone who has actually decluttered a house knows that you do not do it once. You do it in layers. The cold-weather clothes were one layer. The everyday drawer and the closet I open every morning were another, and apparently I had been quietly avoiding them for months.
Which is awkward, because I run a course on decluttering, and I clean out other people’s lives and homes for a living.
So I sat there on the bed for a minute and let the three objections surface, in the order they came:
What if I gain the weight back?
In my head, my mother answered the way she used to answer all of my hypotheticals: What if a little dog’s tail was a razor? I have never been completely sure what that means, and I am not sure she did either, but the function of it was clear. You are spinning out on a thing that isn’t real yet. Come back. So I came back. If I gain the weight back, I will want different clothes for that body anyway. Addressed.
Some of this has never been worn. What a waste of money.
This one is, almost word for word, an objection I answer in the course. The money is already gone. It is gone whether the dress hangs unworn in my closet or rides over to the consignment shop, where it might at least come back as a small check and possibly a new top for a body I actually live in. Addressed.
If I start, will I be stuck in a pile of clothes all day?
This is the most common reason people don’t start at all, and it is the reason I built the course the way I built it. One drawer. Finish it. Stop if you want. Keep going if you want to. Addressed.
So I took my own advice, which felt absurd given that I sell it.
One drawer became four drawers in thirty minutes. The hanging items took another thirty. The sweater shelf and the bagging took the last thirty, because life in New Orleans and Florida does not require a sweater collection, a fact I keep needing to relearn.
Ninety minutes, start to finish. Three bags by the door: trash, donate, consign. I put them in the car so they couldn’t migrate back into the house overnight, which they will if you give them the chance. I found two dresses I had forgotten I owned, both of which fit, and I moved them to the front of the closet. I felt lighter in a way that had nothing to do with the scale.
Somewhere in the middle of folding t-shirts, I realized I was not promoting my work this morning. I was using it. On myself. In ninety minutes.
Mabel came in around lunchtime, pleased about a cup holder situation she had resolved in the car. I told her I had cleaned out my closet. She looked at the three bags by the door with the mild, knowing expression of a person who has lived with me long enough to register the scale of this.
“That fast?” she said.
“Turns out the course works,” I said.
She did not say I told you so. She is a generous woman.
If you’re somewhere in this — packing, postponing, staring at a drawer — I built a free two-minute assessment that will tell you whether you’re a Stuck Starter, an Overwhelmed Organizer, or an Almost-There Editor, and where to start based on that.
If you already know you're ready for the full thing, Clutter to Curated is open now — if your closet is calling your bluff too, this is what I built for it. And the GLP-1 book that runs underneath all of this, Life After the Shot, spends real time on the weight-comes-back fear, which turned out to be the one I needed to answer first.
A question for you, if you have a minute:
I’m curious how this lands, because everyone’s closet, garage, attic, or whole-house version of this is a little different. If you’re in the middle of something, or avoiding being in the middle of something, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
A few that might help you get started:
Are you in a decluttering or downsizing project right now, or thinking about starting one?
Is there a deadline pushing you, a move, a renovation, a season changing, or is this an open-ended someday project?
If you’re moving, is the hard part deciding what to take and what to let go? (The new-house-floor-plan-versus-old-life math is its own particular kind of stuck.)
What pace feels realistic to you, ninety minutes on a weekend until it’s done, or one to four weeks of blowing it out all at once?
And the question underneath the question: what’s the thing you keep walking past?
I read every comment, and the answers will shape what I write next.