How to Clean Your Closet

Close your eyes, slide the door open, and pluck 12 items randomly from left to right. Ignore the weight of your choice. You touch it, you pluck it. Ignore texture, too.
Make no conjecture about your selection. You don’t know if that silky feel is real or synthetic. This moment is your emetic. Commit to the decision at your fingertips.

Turn 180 degrees, eyes still squeezed shut and drop the garment on your bed. Use the dog’s snores as echolocation and, if you’re wrong, he’ll move, possibly on top of the discarded article. He’ll scent it with his scruffy dog odour, make it easier to give away.

Turn 180 degrees again and swish your hand along the row to the next target.

Refuse emotional attachment. No “What if it’s the dress I wore to my niece’s wedding and danced past midnight throbbing in a giant ball of 30-somethings, loosened by their exuberance and youth?” If chosen, it must go too.

Raise each piece carefully, respectfully. Remember, you bought it with the fruits of your labour. It represents your hourly wages. Gently rest it in the crook of your arm. Smooth your worry with your hand.

Be a hound. Sniff it if you want. Is that a whiff of bacon from last night’s Spaghetti Carbonara everyone groaned over? Satisfaction and success at the dinner table is a rare occasion. A pot lid lifted. “Is there more?” Oh glorious encore here on a hangar, how can I let you go?

Shove the hangars to the left. Hear the scrape of hubris. Clothes make the woman. Clothes make the woman what exactly?

Have I filled my closet to fill me? If my closet is empty what will I be? Keep going, even in the dark.

Step inside. Feel the crush of cloth, the metal rod across your throat, the danger of suffocation. There is only one way out. Take the first thing you touch and toss it over your shoulder like spilled salt into the face of the devil lurking behind you. Banish fear. Banish vanity. Banish the past.

Open the green garbage bag. Drop everything into it with your eyes closed. Take it to the nearest charity recycler. There are no serious consequences to your action. So what if nothing in your closet matches? It means this: You are matchless.

Note: I have too many clothes and a small closet. To convince myself I don’t need any more new or second hand clothing, I decided to wear a different ensemble every work day in November. I call the challenge No More Clothes November. #NoMoCloNo

Good for the planet, good for my wallet, good for another blog post or two.

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