The Best Way to Say Goodbye to Sentimental Items
Many decluttering methods are scarily objective, encouraging you to make split-second decisions about what stays and what goes, and to not allow yourself to get too sentimental about anything but to focus on the usefulness of each item in your life . Some methods, like KonMari , leave a little room for things that only bring you joy, but for the most part, you just need to let go of the things that don’t serve you.
The problem is that it’s hard to know how a sentimental or emotionally significant item will benefit you at all. For example, giving up old art projects or your kids’ keepsakes is quite emotional, even if you’ll probably never use (or even look at) that 1997 pasta again. In my family, we deal with this problem by holding “remembrance nights” before we say goodbye to such items. A formal send-off shows how valuable they are and gives you something to think about before parting with them. Here’s how it works.
How to Have a Remembrance Night for Sentimental Items You Need to Get Rid of
The last time I was home visiting my mother, she greeted me with a tower of storage boxes full of items from my childhood: old school assignments and art projects, tons of photos, and all sorts of trophies and plaques. She told me she wanted to get them out of the house, but wanted to give me one more chance to look at them and take a little trip down memory lane before she nukes them. She said I could save something really important, but most of it would be thrown away or donated the next day.
We spent hours sitting on the living room floor, poring over string-bound, construction paper journals from first grade, photographs of our family in front of Mount Rushmore and at Disney World, and school assignments and souvenirs that served as physical proof that I had always been big. botanist.
In the end, I had very little left of those boxes—a trophy I won for beating a particular opponent in an extracurricular event in 11th grade, two cards from my late father, and a few photos I wanted to frame. I photographed a few funny things (like the childhood diary entry in which I opined that it should be illegal to hurt someone’s feelings) in case I wanted to come back to them later. We also set aside a few photos to be digitized, promising to throw them away once they were safely in the cloud.
Plus, the simple act of seeing everything one last time was satisfying—a limited way to revisit my memories without being burdened with things that might seem like old junk to anyone but me. I have found that this has eased the pain of letting go of symbolic representations of the past and may help you too.
Why does it work
As sad as it was to get rid of the tangible evidence of my childhood, deep down I knew that I no longer needed it, and neither did my mother. These are all just things. It doesn’t bring back my childhood. It just takes up space. And as my mother says: “What’s the point of holding on to the past?”
There is no point in keeping items locked in boxes. It was fun going through these boxes together. We laughed and cried, revisited our memories, rediscovered forgotten ones and created new ones to say goodbye. We were also able to do a final check on anything we might not have been willing to part with, such as rare photographs. All this made it much easier for us to get rid of the trash.
How to Prepare to Get Rid of Sentimental Items
If you’re having a hard time parting with old, sentimental items, start by putting them all in a box and leaving them alone for a while. (If it’s all been sitting in boxes for years, congratulations: you’re halfway there.) Then gather your friends or family (or do it alone) for a night of remembrance. Take time to look, touch, read, watch, laugh, or cry at each item in the box, one by one. As you do this, sort each item into one of three boxes: one for things you can throw away, one for things you can donate, and one for the few things you still want to keep.
Donating is especially useful in such a sentimental situation: it’s nice to know that what you value will be valued by someone else. My mom took all my trophies and plaques, for example, to a memorial store in town where they will be turned into new trophies and plaques for other little nerds (or maybe athletes). I don’t know who will receive them, but I hope they will be as excited about them as I was in 11th grade.