Give It a New Home or Just Keep One

Steps Five and Six in Real Simple’s article on Getting Rid of Sentimental Clutter is, again, sound advice. Two principles that work equally well. One uses that old adage, your junk might be someone else’s treasure and the other is to just keep one thing to represent a collection, and then give the rest to someone else as it might be a treasure to them as well!

Now, they admonish us to be careful about that junk/treasure equation because very often your junk is someone else’s junk, and if it’s sentimental to boot and the person you’ve given it to has a value based decision making system and tends to be overly sentimental, they might hold onto it just because it had meaning to you. So be careful especially when giving things to Organics (NFs), Fun Freedoms (SFPs) and Classic Freedoms (SFJs). I actually still have this yellow ribbon vest that my friend gave me 20 years ago and have held onto it because she told me her grandmother gave it to her. When I mentioned it to her recently she had NO MEMORY of said vest. And frankly, she didn’t really like her grandmother, whereas I almost worship mine, so different values and different sentimentality! Needless to say, now that I know she has no memory of said vest, it has joined the great clothes recycling machine at Goodwill.

The other way to winnow down sentimental stuff is to just save the good stuff. No need to hold onto ALL the cards your mom ever gave you, especially when there’s no personal note. Just keep the ones you remember getting, or that give you a special memory. Anything that leaves you cold should go. Or if you’ve got a collection of teapots, just keep the one you like best. I, for one, am not going to be holding onto any baby clothes that my mom didn’t make. But yes, I will be holding onto every single outfit her loving hands created! But I am the schmaltziest, most sentimental type there is — Organic (NF). So I’m sure more practical and less sentimental types — Classic Structures (STJs), Fun Structures (SFPs), and Smarts (NTs) — would probably recycle the outfits that have been stained beyond hope, or that have been shrunk into doll size, or begun to unravel.