The Death of a Wardrobe Hoarder August 2024

Finalizing the Great Wardrobe Exodus of Summer 2024

I have just gone through my “lost projects” Bankers Box, full of various wardrobe projects from as early as 2013. They seem to be a decrepit in their incompleteness, which brings me a sense of greif over wasted time. It seems like all my belongings bring back bad memories and feelings. I wonder what to do with it all as I wonder about myself. I don’t want to be the girl who made these things, and what was going on in her mind as she began and gave up and cycles through self-implosion. Maybe step one is to stop wanting things to be different, but I just can’t live like this anymore. I’m drowning in nostalgia and yearning for lost years. The obsession over shape and measurement information latent in my collection allows me to justify keeping so many things. I have to convince myself that the data is not lost. I can let go of clothes and still remember their impression; thus, they stay with me forever. I am together with my visions from the past, present, and future.

My process includes sorting and trying on all my outfit creations from as early as 2013. I have modeled and photographed several pieces, many emerging from 2018-2020 when I was an older teenager. They served their purpose. When I did complete projects, the satisfaction and pride was fulfilling. Sewing has always made me feel powerful. The techniques are not relevant, all of that is in my head. I do not have to waste time recording the bizarre methods of alteration and construction that I used. It’s all just nifty at best, and I cannot waste time and space on unusable projects from the past. Most of these things, if not all, will be thrown away eventually.

The only relevant wardrobe remnants that I care to keep are any bags, some accessories such as the head covers I made circa 2017 or the gloves I made this year of 2024. There was a period when I was decorating my room and outfitting it will pillows and curtains around 2019. I made various shaped pillows that I would set up in layers on my bed. My favorites were some little heart shaped ones that would frame the front center piece. It made every day feel magical and I rejoiced to get up and make my bed in the morning. A few years later, I cut one of them up to fix my boyfriend’s jacket that meant a lot to him. This heart-shaped scrap symbolizes my broken heart years later. For a while during this process, I have considered making a quilt made up of pieces of lost projects so I can throw the bulk of it away and not feel at loss.

A Hoarder Dies, Reflecting on the Great Exodus

This attempt at downsizing and consolidating my mind is the most successful thus far in my life. There is an obvious physical difference between what I began with and now have left. I can identify the meaning for keeping every piece I have. Where I gained space in my physical environment, my mind is less burdened as well. There is a sense of freedom in my body.

It is a continual process, one that I am learning to love and have patience with. It’s simple, discard of anything which intuition says too. It’s a feeling more than a thought. As I removed the subject of these rituals, they have begun to lose grip on my mind. Surely, I’m past the halfway point and energy seems to be all around me.

This has turned out to be spiritual endeavor of over a decade. For most of my life, I have kept and obsessed over weird artifacts of youth and repeated compulsive routines around them. Its an infatuation with unobservable phenomena, and its best to be alone to do this. I have sacrificed most of my relationships so I can think in solitude. For example, hyper-analyzing time, just breathing and thinking of all the ways to define periods or eras of life, the way they intersect and lead into each other. Its entertaining to narrate and divide one’s life into discrete quantities.  Often, I use my surroundings as the subject of these calculations and fantasies. Focusing on material reality takes me out of my flow state where time disappears, thus creativity remains stagnant.

It seems like I have very little memories of childhood compared to other people because I have been so distracted by my own mind. I remember mostly negative situations and chronic discomfort. This misplacement of energy has led me to neglect the practical matters of life. Often my spirits are crushed when others do not share my visions, and I use that as justification for why I shouldn’t participate in society.

I have great difficulty letting go of the things I have done in the past, feeling grief over lost time. I build up such an overly sentimental idea of certain things, specifically clothes. I think of the younger version of myself being thrown out with the article of clothing, and thus I cannot get rid of it. No matter how much time I have invested in contemplating these things, I will let it all go. Very little is worth my space or energy. Moving forward, I will always ask myself how relevant my belongings are to my happiness. Now that I have experienced destroying so much art, and throwing so much random shit away, I can’t help but ask why, and if this will ever occur again in my life. It’s like Swedish death cleaning, what everyone seems to be doing in my life.