On Letting Go...And Why It's Not That Simple
There's a whole corner of Instagram devoted to the idea that throwing things away will change your life. Five things a day. A timer and a bin bag. I tried it last week. I found an empty tube of toothpaste, a sock with a hole in it and some packaging I was going to bin anyway. Hardly a transformation. My mum tried the timer version — throw as much as you can in five minutes — and got herself to tears. That's not decluttering. That's just stress with a deadline. The problem with all of it is the assumption underneath. That the things filling our homes are things we never really wanted. That we accumulated carelessly, bought on impulse, forgot we owned. And for some people, maybe that's true. But what about when the opposite is the case? What about when everything you own, you chose? When you look around a room and every single thing in it is something you genuinely love — and yet the room has stopped working? That's a different problem entirely. And I don't see anyone talking about it.
I know it well from collecting. There's a particular trap that enthusiastic collectors fall into — I've fallen into it myself — where you start with the best pieces. The ones that stopped you in your tracks, that made you want to start collecting in the first place. Then you find the good ones. Then the decent ones. And at some point, without quite noticing, you're acquiring things not because they're beautiful but because they belong to the category. The collection has developed its own momentum and your eye has stopped leading it. You look at the shelf one day and realise that half of what's there you don't love — you just couldn't find a reason not to keep it.
Then there's the harder version. The things that came to you from people you loved. I've inherited pieces from family members who had real eyes — thoughtful, creative people who made deliberate choices about their own homes. These aren't fuddy-duddy objects I feel obliged to keep out of duty. They're beautiful things I've known since childhood, things that carry whole rooms and whole people inside them. Some I am genuinely thrilled to have. But others — and this took me a long time to admit — I have come to realise are now serving someone else's story. Not my own. And that's a strange and complicated thing to sit with when the object itself is lovely and the person it came from was loved.
So what do you do? The five things exercise doesn't help here. Neither does the timer.
What I've started doing instead — tentatively, just a few photographs so far — is making a record before I let something go. A proper photograph, taken with care. And alongside it, a few lines about what the object was, where it came from, why it mattered. Not to preserve the thing itself, but to preserve the meaning of it. To say: this was real, it belonged to someone I loved, I'm not forgetting it — I'm just releasing it.
It turns out that what made letting go hard wasn't the object. It was the fear of losing the story. And you don't have to lose the story.
A room can only hold so much before the things inside it start competing rather than breathing. The ones that remain deserve space — air around them, room to speak. Editing isn't about caring less. It's about caring more carefully. About deciding what the room is really for, and letting everything in it serve that — and serve it well.
Calm is not something you arrive at all at once. It is something you tend.
Atlanta x A note I've been thinking about this for a while — about what it actually looks like in practice. The small, repeatable act of returning to a room and making it feel right again. I've written it up as a short guide. It's called One Calm Moment, and it's available now for £20. If any of this resonated, I think you'll find it useful. [One Calm Moment — £20] |
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