No room for skeletons

Last year, I faced a great personal crisis. This is the story of how I worked through it. Gentle reader, you will be moved, conflicted, confabulated, eviscerated and exalted by this story: this I guarantee you. Okay, so you will be disgusted, horror-struck and fed up. But these are just semantics. Let's get down to the nitty-gritty.

One fine day last year, I was getting ready to go somewhere. Being my usual planned, calm self, I was panicking with five minutes to spare, and I still had to get dressed. I opened the door of my wardrobe and my world exploded. No, there was no bomb or dead body in my wardrobe. All my clothes were making a break for it.

I stood there with colourful clothing strewn as far as my eye could see, like Scipio amidst the ruins of Carthage. I am severely myopic, so my eye couldn't see very far. Yet, I knew that the time had come. I had to downsize. In a voice constricted and constrained by the huge lump which had developed in my throat, I told my husband the bad news: "I have to let it go."  

"It is going to take time, many years," he said. Ah, the love of my life had understood the deep and abiding love I had for my possessions, I thought. When I figured out that he was talking about my losing weight, I left the place in deep disgust.

I went back to the wardrobe and began to plan my strategy. I would first segregate clothes into wearable/fitting, and non-wearable/too big-too small. Almost immediately, I ran into problems, big ones.

First off, the wearable pile was extremely small, while the non-wearable loomed like the entire chain of the Himalayan range. The reason was absurdly simple. Like a cyclonic cloud, I too tend to gain and lose volume. I had kept buying clothes through the various stages of my expansion, as a result of which I had clothes of four different sizes.

Then there were some outfits that had been gifts. What if the gifter realised that I had regifted their gift to me? Those went in the 'keep pile'. Then there were the ones that had been expensive. I kept them, too. Then came the ones which I had got in sales.

"Of course, I won't give you guys away!" I told them, cradling one outfit like a mother cuddling a newborn seven-month preemie. "You were a steal!"

I took a look at the piles. Huh, quelle surprise! There wasn't much in the 'give away' pile. I still had an ace in my sorting sleeve. I was going to divide the clothes based on the memories they held for me. As it turns out, it was a bad idea.

It appeared that every piece of clothing held an indelible memory for me! This was all the more surprising because I have horrible short-term memory problems. I have been known to stand in front of the open fridge for minutes on end, letting all the cold air out, while I try desperately to remember why I have opened the fridge in the first place.

Came evening and nothing had moved. Except me. I was moved to despair. And then, I had an epiphany.

For the size problem, I would give away all the clothes that didn't fit. When I lost weight, I would just buy new clothes! This itself thinned my pile considerably. As for the rest, I ruthlessly put aside sentiment and mercilessly discarded really old and tacky stuff. I had to blink away tears initially, but it paid off in the end. My wardrobe had breathing space at last. I swear, I'm a reformed soul now. No more binge buying, no more hoarding, no more...

Uh-oh, I've got to finish up this piece. You see, I've got a sale to go to. They have a 'Buy One, Get Two' offer! It's going to be a steal.