I started cleaning out my apartment a few months ago because I was moving.
I had two weeks, I needed to fit my life into fewer boxes than I had stuff, and I started with the obvious — the food in the back of the pantry, the cables for devices I no longer owned, the clothes I hadn’t worn since before the pandemic. That part went fast. By the third day, I was in the closet, and I was pulling out a stack of books I had bought in my late twenties about how to write a novel.
I had not written a novel. I had read maybe one of the books. Maybe a half. The rest had moved with me three times — across two apartments and a state line. I sat on the floor with the stack on my lap and could not figure out why I was so sad.
It wasn’t about the books. The books were paperbacks I’d paid twelve dollars apiece for at a used bookstore. I could have boxed them and donated them in ninety seconds.
What I was actually being asked to do, sitting there, was acknowledge that the version of me who had bought them — the version who was going to write the novel, who was going to be the kind of person who wrote novels — was not the version of me who’d shown up in her place. And it had taken me until that afternoon to notice.
Most of what’s in your house was bought by a slightly different version of you
You don’t notice this when you’re buying the thing.
You notice it when you’re standing in the closet trying to decide what to do with the running shoes you bought for the marathon you signed up for and then didn’t run. With the yoga mat that came with the bag and the block. With the language books from the trip you took once, and were planning to take again. With the camera lens for the photography hobby that lasted four months. With the bread machine, the food processor, the second food processor that was supposed to do what the first one couldn’t, and the cookbook collection from the year you were going to learn to cook.
Professional organizers call this aspirational clutter — the things you bought because they represented a particular kind of person you wanted to become. The runner. The cook. The musician. The traveler. The person who could speak French at dinner with the parents.
The bets weren’t all wrong. Some of them paid off — you really did start running, you really did learn to cook a little, you really did pick up the guitar for a while. But a lot of them didn’t, and what’s left in your closet is the physical evidence of the bets that didn’t come in.
The reason it’s hard to throw away isn’t the item, it’s the admission
You could throw away the guitar in ninety seconds. The guitar is not, in any real sense, the problem. What’s hard is what throwing away the guitar means — which is admitting that you are not going to become the person who plays the guitar, even though you wanted to once, enough to spend three hundred dollars and clear a corner of your bedroom for it.
As long as the guitar stays in the corner, the question stays open. You could still take it up. You could still find a teacher. You could still be the person who picks it up in the evenings after dinner, the way you imagined when you bought it. The guitar lets the door stay technically open, even if you haven’t touched it in four years, and you know you aren’t going to.
Throwing the guitar away closes the door. And the door, it turns out, is what’s actually heavy.
You’re not deciding what to do with three hundred dollars of secondhand wood and steel. You’re deciding whether to stop being the person who could still, one day, decide to play. That’s a much bigger decision, and most of us aren’t really set up to make it on an afternoon while we’re trying to fit a life into a smaller closet.
More Bolde Stories
The future self you were buying for didn’t show up, and something else happened instead
We tell ourselves that decluttering is about letting go of past versions of ourselves. That isn’t quite right. You’re letting go of future versions — the ones you were planning toward when you made the purchase.
None of those versions of you ever quite arrived. But while you were busy not becoming them, something else was happening — you were becoming somebody.
The actual you who shows up to a closet on a Sunday afternoon and decides what stays and what goes. That person has interests, a life, a way of spending her time, things she actually loves doing — and almost none of it matches the brochure your twenty-five-year-old self was writing about her future.
The hard part of looking at the bread machine isn’t grief that you didn’t become the bread-baking version of yourself. The hard part is that you didn’t even notice when the bread-baking version stopped being a real option. She faded slowly, and you didn’t mark the day she left, and the machine on the shelf is the last thing in the apartment that still thinks she might be coming back.
Decluttering is a small act of choosing your present self over your imagined one
Each item in the donation pile is a small, quiet update.
I am not going to be the person who runs the marathon. I am not going to be the person who plays the guitar. I am not going to be the person who writes the novel.
You don’t say any of it out loud. You don’t really say it in your head, either. It happens in the half-second between picking the item up and putting it in the pile, and most of the time you barely notice you’ve made the call.
But you’ve made it. Each item is a small bet on the present self — the one who is actually here, who actually knows what she likes and doesn’t like — over the imagined self who was a forecast made with limited information by a younger person who didn’t yet know who she was going to turn into.
The reason it’s tiring to do this for a whole afternoon isn’t physical. It’s that you’re making, in quick succession, dozens of small acceptances of who you actually became. They accumulate, and an hour into it, you find yourself sitting on the floor next to a pile of running shoes you never broke in, and you’re not exactly sad, and you’re not exactly anything else either.
I ended up keeping two of the novel-writing books. Not because I thought I was still going to write the novel. I kept them because they were good books, and at some point that afternoon, I noticed that I wanted to read them, just as books, with the future-self project quietly dropped. The rest went in the donation pile.
I don’t think you’re supposed to clear out every imagined self. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still going to happen, or might, and the running shoes in your closet are a real plan and not a relic. The work isn’t to scrap all of it. The work is just to know which is which — and to be okay, finally, with what the answer turns out to be.
