About 6 years ago I offloaded almost all of my belongings. At that point in my life I had been living in the same city for the longest stretch of time that I have ever lived anywhere, including when I was a child. It is very easy over this time to end up accumulating a bunch of stuff and of course, most of it ends up being useless shite that isn't really worth transporting.
Since that day, and the subsequent giving away and throwing out of more than 50% of my possessions, I made an effort to hopefully never accumulate things that I cannot transport in a couple of suitcases at any point in time.
The other day I was hanging around my apartment having consumed an edible and one of the brilliant side effects of this drug that I rarely use is that it makes me take better notice of clutter... and my kitchen had plenty of it.
One of the first things I noticed was this jar I keep next to my sink that holds bits and bobs of things that I think one day I might have a purpose for. Old toothbrushes are excellent for cleaning stuff other than teeth so at some point in the past I decided to hang onto my old ones for a future purpose of unknown origin. Why it is that over the years I felt as though I was ever going to need SEVEN of them defies even my limited intellectual logic. When in the hell would I ever need this many of them? Those got thrown out.
I also started taking stock of the things in my cabinets. Under my kitchen sink there was a collection of jars from pickles, mayonnaise, coffee, whatever you can imagine that comes in a jar. I had meticulously cleaned them, presumably at one point or another using one of the many toothbrushes in order to get the spotless and there they remained, for more than a year.
I knew at that point that I had accidentally returned to my old ways of hording because not only was I never going to use 27 empty Nescafe jars, but I probably wasn't ever going to use any of them. Those were thrown out as well during the great sweep of the kitchen.
I think the biggest offense, which I still find a bit amusing, was my collection of empty snus containers.
If you don't know what snus is just imagine "dip" (for the North Americans) but basically it is tobacco that for me at least, was a cigarette smoking cessation method. I've been using this gear for years and somewhere along the lines I decided that I was going to hang on to all of the empties.
This kind of falls into the same category as the Nescafe jars that I had under the sink but they stand even less of a chance of ever being used for anything since the largest amount of stuff you could possibly fit into them would be a half a handful of screws. Of course none of mine contained anything at all. I suppose if anything can come out of this particular part of the experience would be the fact that I can look at how much money I have spent on a nicotine habit because each one of those containers cost me around $15.
They are all now in the garbage somewhere, although I did separate them in the hopes that they would be recycled if that is possible here.
Other items that I ended up tossing out are
- socks where the elastic wore out a long time ago
- underpants with holes in them that I kept as "backup" and I am sure that basically all men do this
- impossibly stained t-shirts that I was convinced I would use to clean up things with despite the fact that my condo comes with twice-weekly maid service
- dozens of take away containers that I swore I would bring back to the same establishment in order to cut down on plastic waste
and of course because I live in Vietnam where getting a plastic bag is basically unavoidable - I had a hundred plastic bags, all stored inside of a much larger plastic bag.
It was nice getting rid of all this stuff and I did do my best to make certain that they will be recycled if possible for all of the things other than the underpants of course.
I promised myself that I would not end up like this again but I suppose for all of us some collection of what is essentially garbage is kind of something that just happens. Are you an accidental hoarder like me? Let's hear about it!