I’ve noticed this a lot recently when I’ve been helping clients organize their closets or dresser drawers. We are sorting the items into categories, and the client says, “Oh, I don’t wear that. I keep it because it has a special memory associated with it.”
As soon as I hear that, I say, “Then this isn’t clothing. This is memorabilia.”
The reason why this is important is because memorabilia should go in a special place devoted to memorabilia. Keeping it mixed in with your clothing just confuses you. When you are getting dressed, you want to see all of the clothing items that are appropriate for you to wear at that particular time. For example, you want to group all of the outfits together that are suitable for work. Keeping your bathing suit cover-ups or your exercise clothes mixed in with the work outfits makes it harder for you to get dressed for work. Similarly, having memorabilia mixed in with wearable clothes slows down your decision-making and takes up valuable closet or drawer space.
There are a number of things you can do to preserve, enjoy, and honor your memorabilia that used to be clothing. I shared some in Clutter-Free Memorabilia. Frame them, make a quilt out of them, keep them in a special box — those are some of the ideas that I mentioned in that post. Take a look and see if any of them speak to you.
