Hitting Pause

Taking another break from sorting stuffies. My spouse has observed that it seems to be slowly killing me. I can’t completely disagree. I’ve gotten increasingly jealous of a 17 year old that is taking most of them. I guess I thought if they were spread out more, I wouldn’t mind as much. Or if it was a wide-eyed grateful 7 year old wanting to take a large portion. I have several nieces/nephews and grandniece/nephews, so we’ve been dropping off most of them at the grand/greatgrandparents house to allow everyone to take what they want. The 17 year old grandson lives there and takes first pick of everything and has accumulated well over half the collection for himself. At first I was ok sharing, but I guess it’s gotten to me that if I can’t keep all the good stuff, I’m jealous that he gets to have it all (and free, of course). I realize it’s very selfish and petty of me. The point is that I’m getting rid of things out of obligation, not out of any innate desire to part with them. And that part is slowly chipping away at me and makes me sad every time I part with things – because I don’t want to. Did I mention I would happily take a note from Marie Kondo to present to my landlord saying I can keep these things and it’s not “too much stuff?”

So I have paused at 32 bags sorted. Maybe I can switch gears to something else for a while. My husband has offered to entertain expensive shelving investments for me. He’s the greatest. That is also anti-Kondo. You’re not supposed to look at storage solutions before everything is sorted. And by the way, half the time she says everything is supposed to fit in one closet per person, including clothing, furniture, outdoor and hobby gear, and even something as large as a treadmill (if we still had one). No. I’m sorry, I am already a decided failure in that aspect. I guess that’s part of why I feel so bad. I feel like I’m failing in so many aspects: that I don’t want to get rid of things, that I selfishly want to keep things that I believe spark joy, that it’s getting into my dreams and creating nightmares, that I wasn’t doing this 24-7 in the first place and refusing to take a day or evening off. My husband mentioned liking a certain brand of stuffed animal yesterday and I told him I already got rid of all of them. I thought he was tired of giving input when these were mainly my obsession. So now I feel badly about that too. Hence I am taking an indefinite break. I can’t keep doing this without hating every single moment of it.