More things to declutter

In my last post about things to declutter, I focused mostly on clothes and things in my wardrobe.

Here are some other more generic items I have been decluttering before moving houses.

• Diaries and planners
  I am a huge sucker for writing by hand and then keeping everything I have written on. I had been keeping yearly planners since 2012. I brought them all to New Zealand with me and kept them in a box at the bottom of my closet for years. As I was trying to free up some space I realised that I had never ever looked back at them in all these years. So I took my time to go through all of them, had a little trip down Memory Lane looking at all the things I have done and appointments and dates and people I’ve seen, I took some pictures of the most memorable dates, then binned them all.
  Of course this does not include journals. I have dozens of journals and I am so attached to them I would save them in a house fire. But I know of people who regularly have a ceremony where they burn their past journals to free themselves from past memories, so if this is your jam, no judgment at all.

• Birthday cards
  No offence to anyone who’s ever sent me a birthday card, but I had TONS of them and they lived in a box and I never looked at them. Again, I took pictures of my favourite ones and recycled them all.

• Digital space
  I’ve actually spent the past few months doing this. I went through all my emails and deleted everything that wasn’t relevant (I went from over 900 emails to just below 100). I deleted old digital pictures that didn’t mean anything to me. I went through my music collection and Spotify favourites, and unfollowed anything I wasn’t listening to. I emptied space from my external hard drive. I deleted old files from Google Drive.
  I was motivated to do this after reading this article by Gittemary, which also made me reflect on the impact of streaming and consuming digital media - but this is a topic for another day.

• Art supplies
  As much as I would like to be an arty person, I am not. Well I am, but I need very little supplies for the very limited art I make. I didn’t need acrylics, different sized canvas, a whole collection of charcoals and three different visual journals, nor the many, many already completed notebooks I had been accumulating. I donated all of my supplies and only kept a few watercolours and brushes that I actually use.

• Small notes of things you haven’t done
  I don’t know about you, but I leave notes to myself everywhere. I write notes on my phone, on post-it notes, in my planner and on random scraps of paper for things I think about when I’m a work which then end up in my back pocket and more often than not get washed in the laundry. I’ve made it a habit to regularly go through these note and either do the things they say, or throw them away.

• Sex toys
  Sex toys are tricky because there’s no way to know if they will work for you unless you try them. They are also tricky because they are so tempting. During lockdown I may or may not have collected a few. But I’ve then realised I always reach out for the same ones, and I actually had a couple that I never took out of the box.
  I would like to do something with the ones I don’t use but in fact I have no idea how to dispose of sex toys in a sustainable way, so if anyone can help me out here I would love to hear from you!

I wrote this list a while ago, before I even knew I would have to move houses. I currently find myself having to downsize like never before (more on this later!), so you can expect more decluttering content soon!