Happy Decluttering

I just got rid of this old T-shirt of mine, not because I rarely wore it.  For more than 10 years, this T-shirt has been my most worn item.  It's almost like my uniform.  Wet Seal, the clothing store where I bought it had gone out of business for a long time now, but I've been wearing this worn-out T-shirt until today.  It's gotten to a point where I have to trash it because there are just too many holes on it.  I was thinking of keeping it to be the food of the moths or silverfish that had been eating it at whatever chance they got so the bugs wouldn't get to my other clothing.  It's amazing how the bugs still managed to eat it when I wear this T-shirt a few days each week.   I think I obviously have a hoarding problem when I actually struggled to keep a 10+ year-old t-shirt that is totally stretched out of shape and that makes me look like I just escaped from a war zone when I wore it.   But now, it's gone.  So there is s...

Along with my piles of magazines that I no longer want ( please feel free to take a copy ), my office desk at home is buried by expired candies that I once snacked on while I worked but I hated the candies so much that I just pushed them to the corner of my desk.  I didn't throw them away immediately because I hate to waste food that is bought by my hard earned money.  I thought they could come in handy during a natural disaster when I could be trapped in my apartment, waiting for FEMA's rescue.  But today, my desk is so taken over by clutter that I can no longer work on it anymore.  I'm sick and tired of having to work on my dining table, so I'm starting to throw away my expired candies.  The first to go was this bad tasting chocolate that I bought at Home Goods for $3.99+Tax.  I bought it because it looked so dainty and it was a product of the UK.  It just seemed exotic to try out  foreign candies during Christmas.  Yet I hated how the...

Am I the only one who is still carrying old and expired credit cards in my wallet ?  I was only aware of it when I was told by a waiter tonight that my credit card was no good.  I recently organized my wallet and yet , there are still useless stuff that are taking up space.  To avoid getting confused again next time when I try to pay for something, I just shredded my old Discover card.  Now my wallet is one card lighter. 

For the last couple years, I had been scared of checking my email.  It's because I always felt so stressed out by the never ending list of emails in my inbox and the "number" of emails that it showed me.  I don't know what started my email phobia, but I guess it started after I missed some of the tasks that somebody emailed me to do...I missed them because those emails were pushed down and buried by huge number of emails that came in on a daily basis.  But avoiding checking the emails or looking at them just made me feel worse.  So I decided that the best way to conquer my phobia is to face the root cause of my fear, which is the clutter and the sheer volume of emails in my inbox. In the last few days, I focused on cleaning up my tens of thousands of emails that I had accumulated forever. I receive so many emails everyday it's becoming overwhelming.  I had always saved my emails feeling that I would need to refer to them someday.  But over the years an...

I may be a hoarder of some sort and I have a lot of clutter in my apartment .  But I know I'm definitely not a plant hoarder.  It's because I never owned any house plant until I recently bought a pot of chrysanthemum for $6.51 (Price + Sales Tax) from the grocery store.  I don't know why I bought the plant.   I could be inspired by the gardening book that I once read . But after bringing the plant home, I had to find a space to put it, and that started my motivation to declutter, and therefore this blog.  The space where I put my one and only house plant had been previously  piled high with lots of books and magazines .  Now that I had cleared up that small spot on the counter to make room for my first and only houseplant in my life, I am beginning to feel the pleasure of living a clutter-free life.  I'm happy that inside my cluttered apartment, I have this one bright spot that is free of clutter.   

Just when I thought that I had slimmed down my wallet , there I saw a reward card from a grocery store that no longer exists.  I have to say that looking at this reward card makes me miss my once favorite grocery store.  Since the closing of the store, I haven't cooked one single meal at home.  This store used to have very tasty marinated chicken breasts that  tasted so fresh and delicious. The price of such fresh tasting chicken breasts was also very reasonable.  All I needed to do was  pan fry them.  I never liked to cook my own chicken at home because the meat always tasted gamy. The same gamy taste can be found in the chicken from a lot of lower-price restaurants.  Chicken breasts that are frozen usually carry this kind of stinky smell.  The smell can be somewhat  temporarily masked by the high heat Chinese stirfrying method and the Asian sauces, but  I could always taste it even when the meat was fresh out of the wok. ...

For a very long time, I have been feeling very bogged down.  Yet, I don't even know which aspect of my life makes me feel this way, since it can be just anything.  I feel so overwhelmed that I don't even know where to start looking for the sources of my feeling. I'm feeling overwhelmed by just the sight of everything around me, including my purse.  I need to get out of my state of paralysis, I must!  So I need to start doing something! Since I don't really know where to start, I begin with the most obvious and frequent trigger of my mental paralysis: my wallet.  My wallet has been so bulky and stuffed that I have come to a point where  I can't even buckle the snap anymore. I'm not the type to carry cash. It's mainly because I never was given cash to carry when I was a kid. No, my parents never gave me any allowance or pocket money. They never made me run shopping errands either. I never had a cent in my pocket when I was growing up.  Then ...