What Grows Back After You Let Go

On this episode of Organizing an ADHD Brain, ADHD coach Megs breaks down the "deadheading" analogy, removing what's no longer living so your energy and resources can go toward what will actually thrive. Whether you're looking for ADHD coaching, a supportive ADHD community, or practical ways to get organized, this episode meets you where you are.

By the end, you'll have a new framework for making decluttering decisions that feel regulated, intentional, and aligned with where you're actually going, not where you've been.

Megs shares the real story behind letting go of most of her family's belongings before their move from Colorado to Massachusetts. When she and Adam learned that moving pods could cost up to $16,000, they made a different call, sell, gift, donate, and occasionally discard. What followed was an unexpectedly emotional process of untangling identity, memory, and nervous system strain from the objects filling their home.

She reflects on the time cost of selling, the weight of repeated decision-making, and how Dana K. White's decluttering questions helped her make choices that felt grounded rather than reactive. She shares memorable exchanges with buyers and neighbors, what they chose to keep (sentimental ornaments made the cut), and how renting furnished places freed them from the pressure of building a "perfect" space, and let them focus on what was actually next.

The good news? You don't have to let go of everything. You just have to get clear on what you're growing toward, and deadheading gets a lot easier from there.

This episode is for anyone with ADHD who is holding onto more than they need and is ready to make peace with letting go.

Products mentioned in this episode: Colorful storage drawers with gold knobs: https://amzn.to/3Pxt9oY 3-tier rolling cart: https://amzn.to/3PgYDQm

Organizing an ADHD Brain is supported by its audience: when you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Would you like to learn more about hiring Megs as your ADHD coach? Start here> The Perfect Place to Start

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Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants 0:00

Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Organizing an ADHD Brain. I am your host, Megs, and I was sitting out front of my house yesterday, and I was deadheading a plant, which I looked up pretty shortly after I was deadheading it and realized that this plant actually doesn't need to be deadheaded. But as I was sitting there, Charlotte came up, and she was asking me what I was doing, and I explained to her, "I am removing the dead parts, like the little buds that aren't alive anymore, the leaves that are dead, some of the

Deadheading Plants

Audio Only - All Participants 0:39

crunchy parts, because when you water a plant that has a lot of dead parts on it, it doesn't allow the nutrients to go to the places that really need the water to thrive. The water starts going to all of these dead places because it's trying to revive the things that are already gone." And I was like, oh my gosh, this is such a good analogy for the way that we live our lives with our stuff, with our brains, with our to-do lists, with our clutter. We don't take enough time to deadhead, and honestly, sometimes I don't take enough time to deadhead my plants. But I thought that that was so fascinating. one thing I haven't talked a ton about was letting go of all of our stuff back in Colorado, and I wanna share with you the way in which I went about it, and I don't know that I would've done anything differently. This is not a how-to episode. I just wanna share what my experience was and maybe just give you a little food for thought, because as you hear my perspective on how I let go, it can allow you to gain some insight on how you'd like to let go in your own life, how you might wanna deadhead your spaces or your to-do list or your brain. When we initially made the decision to move We started to look at all of the options to move our stuff back to the East Coast, and it was gonna cost a lot of money. I believe initially it was like $16,000 if we had three pods. Then if we had had a smaller one, it was going to be, I don't know, six or $7,000. So as Adam and I were talking, we decided that we would simply let go of a lot of the stuff that we had. Ultimately we knew that we wanted to save money to buy a house. We knew

Moving Costs Reality

Audio Only - All Participants 2:53

that this house would likely need different things than the things that we've had before. And so we went about it with the attitude that we're going to be able to replace whatever we have with new things, and based on our experience, maybe even things that people are getting rid of, people are letting go for free, things like that. So that helped us make some decisions. And I had been doing this work for a really long time. I had gotten our home to a place where everything had a place, everything had a home. Things were labeled. Things had their own bins. It was not perfect, but it was perfect for us. Our home had been created into a home, and it felt really good. And then as we started navigating the different spaces and cleaning things out and deciding what stayed and what would go, we started to realize how much more we truly had and how much more we weren't using. I say that, too, to say that if you are moving and you haven't decluttered already, you are naturally going to feel this overwhelm regardless of how much stuff you have. Like I said, I had been doing this for so long, and then yet we still had so much more. Of course, being a professional organizer, I had read so many different books on letting go and decluttering, my favorite being from Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life. I just love her methods. The way that she asks questions has a lot to do with regulation, coming back to your conscious brain and making a decision that makes sense for you in the moment and isn't necessarily a reaction. It's a response to what you decide to do next. I brought back into my life lots of Facebook selling, And I actually remember so many of the things that we sold. When we moved out of our house, we had a move-out clean, and the woman who came to clean out the house left with a lot of things. I loaded her up. I said, "Would you like this bucket? Would you like this mop? Would you like this? Would you like that?" And she took a lot of it. We even gave the air fryer away to the woman who was cleaning with her. And her and I then connected. We had a really good conversation about the election, and she had actually

The Unexpected Moments

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voted for who is in office right now and shared with me how she didn't realize how much that would impact her and her nationality being Mexican, while also living in this country for over 30 years and having three sons who are veterans. And it was really interesting to be able to connect with her on that level and also be able to share my things with her. I remember another gentleman who came and bought my really amazing orange rug that was outside in our backyard, and he told me he was gonna be using it for his camper. They would roll it out whenever they landed in different spaces that him and his wife would be camping in. There was another woman who was filling up her Airbnb. So she came with her granddaughters and her daughter, and she bought the nugget. She bought some of the decor that I had, and her granddaughter ended up walking away with some of my gel nail polishes. The girls had a stuffy sale because, of course, I thought for sure that I wouldn't miss the stuffies very much. But sometimes we think about them or we see them in pictures and we're like, "Oh, stuffies. Why do stuffies have so much sentimental value?" But it was fun Because there was this one woman who is a teacher, a science teacher, and she saw my post on Facebook and drove over one afternoon And she sat on the blanket out in the front of our house, picking out the different stuffed animals that she wanted to use in her classroom. so she was finding the animals that would make sense to the curriculum that she was teaching. So that felt really fun and exciting, and her and I had a really good long conversation about ADHD and how it shows up and how it's just so fascinating, the things that we're discovering now as humans and the fast pace at which our world is growing, but the things that we now know about how we can grow and how we can evolve and how we can still change into the people that we want to be, even if we've been a certain way our whole lives. That was a really cool conversation. We sold our washer, and it was a great washer, the door on top of it, we had to duct tape. It was a really nice washer, and it had duct tape on it. There was a gentleman and his wife who came to pick it up, and he didn't speak English, and so we were communicating with him. He said, "I'll just handle it on my own." And so we called one of our friends to see if he could come over and help us get this washer into the bed of this guy's truck. And We used Google Translate to navigate how to do that. And then I was trying to show them how to use it, and him and his wife were saying, okay. It's okay." I... They didn't want to inconvenience us, and I insisted, "Let me show you how to use this." So I showed them how to use it as we were waiting for our friend to come over to help load the washer into the truck. We were joking around because my husband and I are learning Spanish, and so I was sharing some of my favorite words with them in s- Spanish, which are or were at the time, disculpe, which is excuse me, or disculpa, and I have no idea when to use which one because masculine and feminine, and also miercoles, which is Wednesday. I just really like it. It's just such a fun word to say, And we got the washer loaded up in the truck, and we got it all strapped down, and they were on their way. And the woman who had barely said a word the whole time, gave me a really big hug, and that was really cool. And I hope they're really enjoying that washer. There was another woman who came and picked up our Adirondack chairs and was sharing with me, where she planned to put them, and we had to get them into the back of her car, and they wouldn't fit. So we had to maneuver them in a way that made sense, and it took me and my husband and her daughter to finally get the puzzle pieces to work together, and we did, and that was brilliant. Anyways, our Cutco guy bought our car from us way back when, I think two or three years ago. And then when he was coming to check our knives before we ended up moving, he shared with us that his wife was pregnant, and we told him that we were gonna sell our bed, and he bought our bed from us. In fact, we left it in our house after we had moved out 'cause he couldn't pick it up before we left the house. So we gave him our garage code, and he got in and picked up the bed, and it's a really nice bed. It's a Purple mattress. We did not factor in how uncomfortable other mattresses around this world and places we would stay would be. I will say that the mattress we're sleeping on now is amazing. It's the best one yet. Oh, there was this other woman who came to our garage sale 'cause we had a garage sale. This woman came over, and she was decorating her home. And she looked at this, she was like, "Oh my gosh, this is all the stuff I need." And so she bought a bunch of stuff. And she left, and then she came back 'cause she needed more. And it was funny 'cause there was another gentleman who came and started to tell me all about the statistics of people moving in and out of Colorado and in and out of Massachusetts, and he said that Us moving back into Massachusetts was statistically unaligned. And I was like I suppose we are statistically unaligned people," 'cause that is indeed what we are going to be doing regardless. There were a lot of people who bargained with us. There were people who got great deals. There were friends who came and got things for free. I am in the market for a monstera because a friend of mine had gifted me one, and I love this plant. It grew so well, and I learned so much on how to take care of it. So as I was leaving, I gifted my monstera to my neighbor, and she has a couple of my other houseplants as well. And now I am without those, and I certainly do miss my plants. And it has been nice for a moment not to have houseplants because I didn't have the capacity when we got here to also navigate where to put houseplants and what that looked like and how to go about doing that. My other neighbor she bought our tool bench from us, which now that I'm talking about it, that was a little hard because it had taken us so long to finally get Adam a really nice tool bench, and then we sold it because, we were moving. Things change, and that's okay 'cause we had it for a little bit, and it was such a beautiful color. Oh, that same neighbor who bought the tool bench also bought a lot of the craft things that I already had organized, so that was pretty cool. I had already organized all of these like markers and tools into little drawers, which I love. They're all different colors. They've got little gold handles on them, and she bought them from me. I would buy again, those little drawers. I can link it in the show notes below because they're great. That was really fun, and I know they went to a good home. She also got our craft cart. We have one of those three-tiered carts, and on each level we had something different for the girls to play with. Our other neighbor bought our bike, and we gave her all of our blue Christmas lights, which makes me really happy because her and her husband do a really good job decorating their house each year. We also worked with the people who bought our house, and they bought some of the stuff. That worked really well for the house that made sense for us to pass it on. There were also things that we left, and it was great. We made some great money when it came to our stuff, and I also have gone through that scarcity mindset piece where, "Oh my gosh, I don't wanna let this go without selling it because that feels really uncomfortable. I still get that. It still comes up. It's this natural thing that comes up. "I need to recoup the cost on whatever this is because I spent money on it." And doing this work and seeing other people's attachments to things, has really helped me make peace with not making money on everything. And also understanding that there's a cost associated with how much time I spend on this. The amount of time that I spent on selling things was exhausting. It was a whole nother job. That is likely why it took time to-- a lot longer to build my business during the year that we moved, because my time was so fragmented. I do remember I sold my Cricut, and I made Adam drive to the McDonald's parking lot, and he delivered it to an RV that was sitting in the parking lot. I was like, "Oh, that's so weird. They must be traveling through." And then we proceeded to see that RV there every night for the next four weeks. Oh, another friend inherited Charlotte's old bike. Lots of really cool things. So wherever I could, we repurposed things in a way that they either went to someone who could use it, or we were able to give it away, or we sold it. And that, that felt really good. And there were a lot of things that we didn't sell. I had been doing this for so long, the Facebook selling piece, that I just knew how much effort would have to go into selling some of those smaller things and even some of the bigger things. So there was a whole lot of stuff that I ended up donating. wherever I could. And I donated to different charities clothing. I donated to places that were going to be able to accept and recycle clothing in at least I hope what was an ethically

The Emotional Weight of What You Cannot Sell

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responsible way. That is a whole nother conversation about how much clothes we have in this world. I had to really truly make peace with letting go of things without receiving money on the back end. I did make peace with it in a tax way, where I kept track of everything that I donated. So that made me feel a little bit better about it. But what I will say is once I made peace with letting it go, and what I mean by that is making the decision to not sell it, but I knew I wanted to get it out of my house. I simply brought it to, in my case, Goodwill. Come at me if you want, but they take everything, and the Goodwill where I was at was really good. They were amazing at sorting. I brought it there, I got a receipt, and the feeling I felt when my car was released of all of that stuff felt incredible. It was just so amazing to be on the other side of not having all of that stuff anymore. But it took so long. It took so long. It was a journey. One thing I have to do with my clients is understand what they want and help them understand what they want. What's the vision you have for your future and how you live your life? Because with everything, there is a decision to be made. With all of your stuff, your to-do list, the stuff on your brain, everything that comes up is a decision to be made. And those decisions only become clear when you know where you're headed. And so for us, we knew we wanted to drive across country, and we wanted it to be fun. We didn't want our stuff to weigh us down. We didn't want it to hold us back. And the more stuff we brought with us, the slower we were gonna go, literally because we had to tow it, and there were already four animals, two kids, and two adults in the car that we were using to tow this trailer. So making the decision on what we kept had a lot to do with what we wanted in our future. All the furniture we had, that was e- easy, so to speak. There were some really cool things that we had, and we knew that any of it would be replaceable. We really loved our sectional couch, and I remember we found a really lovely family that came, and we gave them some time to enjoy the couch as we went outside. And there were two little kids, so cute, who were climbing all over it, and they decided to buy it, and that was really cool. I gave my egg chair away. It was one that I had bought when I got a promotion in the corporate world into a new leadership position,

Using Your Vision to Guide Your Choices

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and it had seen better days, and I took the spray paint that I was gonna spray paint it with and dropped that off too so that they could do touch-ups when needed. and guess what? I have an egg chair again, and I really like it. And I got it off Facebook Marketplace, and it's so great. But knowing that we didn't want our stuff to weigh us down, we had to make strategic decisions and decisions on what we want. And what we wanted was to let most of everything go. we were looking for a really big change, and boy, did we get it. We ended up keeping things like all of our Christmas ornaments because that brings us so much joy. We have one ornament in particular that is a mustache, and the only reason why we have that mustache is because we saw a Jimmy Fallon sketch Where they played a real song about mustaches by a French artist, and we thought it was the most hilarious thing. And so now every time we decorate the tree, we sing the song, and now the girls know it too, even though they've never actually seen the sketch. So it's things like that bring us so much joy that we wanted to bring with us. We brought some toys and also any of the toys that we sold, I ended up putting in an account for the girls so that they could buy things when we got here, and that helped them make some peace as we navigated a new normal and what that looked like. I remember one of my friends told me, she was like, "When I heard this is what you were doing, I thought you were just very independently wealthy." And I was like no, that is not the case at all." But all of this was a huge test on my nervous system. And my husband's and my girls', All of this to say that when we're letting go, I say a lot about making peace with it, right? What does that actually mean? What does it mean to make peace with letting go? When everything is important, nothing is important. So if we're trying to keep everything, then we have to maintain everything. And if we're trying to use everything, then it can get really overwhelming because now, even though we want to be doing this one thing over here, these other things are beckoning us to come and use them as well. And now it's easier said than done.

Making Peace a Practice

Audio Only - All Participants 21:24

I still get excited about so many different things, but when I become and practice being more discerning with the decisions that I make, it allows it to be easier to live a life with less. So we let go a lot of stuff. We sold some of it. We recouped some money, and it wasn't nearly enough to get us back to replenishing it, right? But we did a little bit, and then we repurposed some of it in a way where we were able to give it to people who we knew were going to use it and enjoy it right away. And then we also had to let things go knowing we weren't going to get any money and also did not see people actually using these things. We didn't know what would happen. We were just hoping for the best. And then sometimes we had to throw things away. But in all of those cases, we came to the decision on what to do by asking what we wanted. And when we decided we knew that we wanted to let something go, we then had to make a decision on, okay, now how are we going to let it go? However hard it may be, however uncomfortable it might be, however much we cry, because it's okay to cry. It's okay to cry about letting things go, and it's okay that it's not actually easy right away or at all. It's actually okay that it feels yucky because it's supposed to. We're sometimes waiting for the right time or oh, when I'm ready. And I will say I like that phrase for when you're ready to go through say, a loved one's items after they've passed. Grief is a whole nother journey. ultimately, letting go and practicing letting go is not easy. And you can allow it to be. You can allow it to be easy by practicing, by seeing what it could feel like and learning how to trust yourself living with less As we arrived in Massachusetts and found a place to land, we found furnished places. We found places that had all the furniture we needed because guess what? The money that we had planned to spend on buying a house actually didn't really work out for us in that way, and there's nothing wrong with that. It just meant that we didn't wanna spend money on furniture. So we found ways to make peace with furniture that people let us use just by renting their place, and that

What it Feels Like on the Other Side

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was really incredible. We made peace with knowing that this was temporary and that we would be able to replenish whatever we wanted without making buying furniture and having a perfect home be the most important thing in these moments. It became less about the stuff and more about understanding what's next and what do we actually want in this life. Instead of having a perfect home and, being able to Instagram it, it was more about how can we make this place a home in a way that we feel really comfortable in it? So it's been just really interesting to navigate, and it's fun to reflect on where all of these things went. We went from, having everything we could've ever wanted to not having a lot of stuff at all, and we're okay. And I cried a lot, and it wasn't always about the stuff. But I share this because on this journey that we're on, understanding my relationship with stuff has been so interesting. And I will tell you, deadheading this stuff and letting it go has allowed us to thrive and bloom in so many ways that I never expected or thought possible. I was watching the new movie the other day on Netflix. I'm gonna pull this up What is, I think it's called Beautiful Creatures. And I'm gonna try to play this for you now 'cause I recorded it on my phone. Our relationship with stuff goes so much deeper than just having it or not having it, and this was beautiful, this quote. This is the octopus speaking I know what it is to scavenge, to forage under reefs and rocks, but the humans' obsession with objects goes deeper. They remember with them. We

Octopus Mic Drop

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remember with them, and we can't possibly hold on to everything. We can't possibly hold on to every memory. And so how do we start to let go so that we can build new memories, start to live in the now with what we have instead of living in the past with what we think we should do or what we are hoping to do or we're hoping to achieve, or living in the future and planning all these projects that we don't actually have time for right now? I hope that this episode brought you some really delicious food for thought, and I will see you next week