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Renewed Order


At the end of every summer, I do a thing that might best be described as "reverse nesting." I think of nesting as getting cozy--this is a big clearing out before the cozyfying. It's still hot but I'm ready for the shimmer to fade from the asphalt so we can go back outside, and I take out my annoyance at the wait on our closets.

Recent personal revelations (and physical changes--I don't know if it's pandemic squish or Being A Woman In Her 30s squish, but honestly I've been underweight for enough of my life that I don't care what number is on my jeans at this point) led to a clearing out of most of my wardrobe, and the kids are all mid growth spurt so we've been making near weekly trips to drop off donations. I cleaned up my side of the closet which prompted my partner (who is honestly a much tidier person generally than I am) to do the same to his side, and also took a hard look at what I really need and what's just filler.

A metric I always keep in the back of my head is a variation on "what would I grab on my way out if I was being evacuated from my home?" except it's "could I fit everything I claim to need into a travel trailer?" Every year I get closer to that answer being yes. I don't know exactly why that's the unit of measure I use--maybe because it's measurable and also smaller than where I live now. I don't want to expand to fill the available space; I want to leave room for adventure.

A trap I can get caught in is scampering back and forth between All The Pretty Things and strident minimalism. Recently I've been trying to find a better balance by acknowledging what I do need (subject to personal definition) and then making sure that those things are pretty. This realization came recently while folding laundry. I do not enjoy doing laundry, and will typically happily live out of the dryer until forced to remove my clothes to make way for the dryer to be, y'know, used to dry something. But after I took out all of the clothes that didn't fit (either my body or my personhood) I noticed that I was putting them away the day I washed them. I guess the block wasn't laundry, per se, but more that on a certain level the specific garments felt like a betrayal and I avoided them.

That revelation caused me to reexamine the places things tend to pile up in my life (both literally and figuratively), in a slightly different way than my usual yearly clear out (I would really love for the yearly clear out to eventually become finding new homes for the few things that are no longer serving our family). I asked myself what it is that I really want (in a grand sense), then did some inventorying, donated quite a few things that I thought I liked but actually turned out that I liked what they represented, and canceled a few subscriptions. I redid my daily schedule and found a large block of time that I'd have sworn I didn't have, and did the same thing with our family budget. I'm not entirely certain what will come of it, at this point, but at least whatever comes to fill in the empty spaces will find a more honest version of me waiting there.

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