I am a clothes girl through and through. You need someone to go shopping with? I’m there. Whether it be at TJ Maxx or Marshalls, the outlet mall, or in most cases a thrift store, I love to shop and come home with super cool items of clothing.
Every year, I do a closet purge, sometimes more than once a year depending on how much stuff I accumulated that year. My dresser drawers almost never shut fully, and the bar in my closet is bowing in the middle under the weight of all the clothes so most times, I try to get rid of lots of stuff. I’m not just wasting it, though. Most of it goes to my younger cousin, and she gets so excited on ‘closet day’, as we have dubbed it.
As she’s rifling through the clothes, deciding what she wants and what she doesn’t, I realize that most times, it’s stuff I had recently bought; within the past year or two.
I go examine my dresser and closet to see what’s left if I have taken out the stuff that I just bought, only to find my high school field hockey shirt, the glaringly pink shirt I wore the first time I met my foreign exchange sister, and the sweatshirt covered in paint stains that I stole from my dad when he said he didn’t want it anymore.
How are these items of clothing that are old, falling apart, and maybe even too small for me, staying in my dresser and closet when clothes that I’ve actively picked out in recent times, that I really love, getting put in the closet day bin?
They are sentimental and I cannot let them go. I have a plethora of clothes that are definitely not my style anymore and I really don’t wear ever. From my freshman year homecoming dress that I bought for an absurd amount of money after crying in Macy’s, to my Hermione Halloween costume from junior year, to every single dance costume that has ever been worn in a recital (12 years worth), my closet is full.
While I’m losing space for stuff I actually will wear, my closet will stay like this forever. Because I have those things in my closet, I’m able to pull out old dance costumes and reminisce about being on stage for my old studio, or I get to have my cousin try on all my old high school dance and formal dresses.
This problem will only grow, however, it’s a problem I’m privileged to have. Although it causes frustration because I have a minor shopping problem, I wouldn’t ever give up my high school field hockey shirt, the glaringly pink shirt that I wore when I met my exchange sister, and definitely not my dad’s Michigan sweatshirt that’s covered in paint stains.