A submission from Brittany

I recently moved from a large apartment in the Sunset district of San Francisco to an extremely small apartment, which doesn’t even have a living room, in the Mission district. This move has given me the opportunity, as well as forced me, to cleanse myself of unnecessary objects which I have held on for too long. I ended up giving two huge car loads of stuff to Good Will, and have continued to give more random things around the house that are not going to be put to use often enough, to local thrift stores. I have found that a good way to decide whether to keep something or not is to ask yourself…when was the last time I actually used that? If the answer is over a year ago…get ride of it! I realized when packing up my old apartment that there were things in the hall closet that I hadn’t used in the two years in which I lived there, so I gave them away. This strategy works especially well when trying to thin out my clothes…if there was a garment which I had not worn for a year (I always think that some occasion will present itself that that garment would be perfect for…but that usually doesn’t happen)…I got ride of it! Although I have successfully cleansed myself of many unnecessary stuff, I fear the pack rat inside of me will always be present when it comes to certain things. These “treasures” include: my collection of movie theater tickets, which come to at least 500 and date back to the original Lion King movie…my collection of scraps of beautiful and interesting paper that I may use for an art project some day (which I occasionally do)…or the six (or more) garbage bags worth of stuffed animals from my childhood that have been sitting in my parents garage since I was 14 that I refuse to let them give away. Maybe someday the time will come when I can part with these objects, but I’ve decided to take it in baby steps.

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