When I moved into my new dorm for the fall 2025 semester, I felt a mix of emotions on arrival. Firstly, I was elated to find that my new dorm was clean, air conditioned, and spacious — something I was disappointed to find lacking the year prior. However, once I started moving my clothes from the boxes and blue IKEA bags they had been stored in for most of the summer, I soon figured out that the storage was lacking. Although the storage in my sophomore and freshman year dorms weren’t amazing, they did provide more than this year’s room. I’ll always be grateful to now have an actual closet with a door this year, but I also had to quickly run to Walmart in search of a plastic drawer set to make up for what I wasn’t given. Eventually, even with two sets of plastic drawers, the drawer provided, the closet, and fifteen new hangers, I still found myself storing my winter sweaters and lesser worn items back into a blue bag under my bed to be taken out at another time.
I see this as a result of two things: the large amount of clothes I own and the poor storage space. After finishing my move in, content with my clothes being under my bed, I had the realization that if I was okay with leaving some pieces hidden for an unknown amount of time, then parting with them probably wouldn’t be such a loss after all. After that, I started to come up with more reasons why downsizing my closet would be for the best. Next semester, I plan to go abroad. Although bringing my full closet with me for only one semester was never going to be in the cards, I also shouldn’t be okay with having most of them sit in storage for over three months. That seems both wasteful and unnecessary.
Another reason behind this is that as someone who is now a junior at Kenyon, I feel that I have a better grasp of what I like to wear and what type of clothes I prefer to buy. Some of the pieces I wear all the time are from high school or my freshman year at college and I would be heartbroken to let go of them. I bought other pieces from that time, thinking they would be different, thinking that they would be worn “someday, but not now.” And now, halfway through the semester of my junior year, I still haven’t worn them.
Over the past week, I have started to parse through the various articles of clothing that I either haven’t worn or don’t see myself ever wearing, so they can be given to a family member or friend, or donated to our local Goodwill. With all of these ideas in mind, donating clothes that could make someone else very happy makes me feel even more confident about sorting through my closet.