Coming back home was a forced opportunity to go through all the belongings in my 28 years of living and to start giving most away. After reading that Magic Tidying Up book, I put some of the principles into action with my clothes, books, personal memorabilia and finally makeup.
I had some sense, when I was in Toronto, that there was a massive number of items waiting for me in Vancouver and that once the family of my belongings was finally together, some things would have to go; If not only due to lack of space but also due to unrealistic lifestyle aspirations. Before I started my big makeup purge, I had put the recently brought back from Toronto items into the storage system I had set up in Vancouver.
Storage was basically done by dividing like items into separate shoe box sized clear Sterlite containers which I lined inside the bottom two drawers of my dresser. An entire bulging shoe box each of blushes, lipsticks. foundations, eyeliners/mascaras, and eyeshadows was more than a life-(and face)-time's worth of products so the purging began in earnest.
But my god was it difficult. Picking out which blushes to give away reminded myself that I don't enjoy super sparkly blushes so those automatically came out of the box. I had multiple versions of some shades so I made some hard decisions and let some duplicates go.
Lipsticks were even harder. Even though duplicates were more than plenty, every new swatch reminded me how beautiful a shade was (and how little I wore it). I also saw how little sense my lipstick collection made. I love purple shades but had 4-5 items. I like (but don't love) berry shades but had something like 20. My arm was so marked up and stained from swatching and re-swatching lipsticks but seeing the colors didn't make decisions any easier. Eventually I started grouping everything into like-colors and then only picking out the few shades from each group that I really 'loved'.
When I started on lipsticks, I was probably already into hour three of makeup purging and my energy was running very low. I'm sure I agonized over an hour about lip colors alone and I didn't even make some final decisions until the next day.
Going through my shadows, liners and mascaras was just too overwhelming at that point so I gave up and reverted into 'tidying' mode where I merely re-grouped things within a box. I didn't have any mental energy to decide if things should stay.
The purging still continues. This whole process has made me realize how wasteful I am. A lot of my items (clothing, books) were donated or recycled but there were some things that just had to go into the trash. The thought of each and every bag of garbage I have added into a landfill makes me sort of ill. The thought of keeping everything though, also gives me such anxiety about how cluttered my physical (and mental) space was and how excessive owning so many items is.
I'm moving into David's place in a few months and have a mini Alex drawer system there (which I found of Craigslist for $60!) so I won't show you how the final makeup storage looks just yet but the goal is to fit everything into that small 6 drawer Alex and if things don't, well...more will just have to go.
How is your purging coming along?
No comments:
Post a Comment