‘On the couch’ with Jasminda

DEAR Jasminda,

I am doing a complete clean out of my home, but I can’t decide what to keep and what to cull.

How do I make these decisions?

Claudia D.

Dear Claudia,

I am the wrong person to ask about this.

When I decide to clean my bedroom, I enter the zone of nostalgia.

Soon, I am surrounded by clothes from the 1990s, boxes of electrical cords that seem important (and yet I have no idea what they belong to), a boxed wedding dress, letters from friends, artworks that no longer suit our decor, but hold fond memories, the kids’ baby teeth, orders of service from every funeral I’ve attended, and childhood teddy bears amongst other items.

No matter how hard I try, I’m unable to take the next step, which is to realise that these are items I will never use again, except to remove them from drawers and put them back with every spring clean.

Marie Kondo would weep over my inability to declutter.

With each item, she would ask if it brought me joy, and I would not have a sufficient answer, except to ponder if joy is really what we are after when we rearrange our belongings.

I suspect it is not the freeing nature of joy, but the sentimental pull of nostalgia.

One of my sons has inherited this sense of longing.

He has it much worse than I do.

A couple of times I have tried to give away some things from his childhood – his Lego, a jar of shells, a size 5 hand-knitted jumper – and he looks at me as though I am trying to sell one of his kidneys.

My daughter, on the other hand, is a Marie Kondo loyalist.

She will throw anything away without a hint of reflection.

Cards, clothes, trophies. She tosses them with abandon.

Whenever she does a cull, I head to the bin and do some surreptitious retrieving.

Somewhere between these extremes is probably where you want to be with your complete cleanout, and there are some great strategies for achieving your goal.

The best one I’ve found is to clear everything out of the room and then sort your things into four groups: Keep, Move, Donate/Sell and Chuck.

Start with one cupboard and don’t move on until you have finished.

If you are trying to work out what to keep, interrogate your reasons.

If it’s a pair of shorts, for example, that you’ve kept for 10 years because you’re going to squeeze into them one day, let yourself move on from that thought.

If it’s a wedding dress that carries nostalgic memories and you have room for it, you have every right to hold onto it.

Make your decisions quickly. DO NOT SIT DOWN (this is important).

As soon as you sit on the floor and open up that box of photos and letters, Coldplay’s Warning Sign playing in the background, you’re on your way to an emotionally-overloaded situation that no amount of storage boxes and Glen 20 will fix.

Carpe diem,
Jasminda