Ep. 242: When Clutter Pulls at Your Heartstrings: Letting Go Without Losing Yourself

I want to start today differently than I normally do.

No big intro. No recap of last week. No warm-up.

I just want to say something out loud that I've been sitting on for a while. Something I've been avoiding. And the fact that I've been avoiding it is actually the perfect setup for everything we're going to talk about today.

Okay. Here goes.

I have boxes of baby things in my house. And I haven't opened them.

Not because I don't have time. Not because I don't have space. But because I know what it means if I do.

It’s a much different reason, and I’m thinking you might be able to relate too. 

Maybe for you it’s not about the boxes either. 

I’ve got a lot to share…so let’s get started.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

https://www.jenniferroskamp.com/organic-the-clutter-languages-guide

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Transcript

OK, so my youngest is eight years old. And if you don't already know this about me, I have a total of nine kids. And my youngest is now eight. And before her, I had babies who were at home and kind of being born on a continuous rotation for 18 years straight. 18 years of tiny socks and pacifiers and board books with the corners chewed off, of toddlers who thought I hung the moon.

of little girls who twirled in the kitchen just because they could, for no reason at all, just because the music was on and life was good and they hadn't learned to hold themselves back yet. My life was full of little boys who told me they wanted to marry their mom someday and they said it like it was the simplest, most obvious, obvious thing in the world. Like there was no other possible answer. Of course I want to marry my mom. Well that season is over and I want to be really clear. I love where I am now.

I love my older kids deeply. I love being a Gigi, which is who I am as a grandmother. I genuinely love this stage of life more than I ever expected myself to. So please don't hear me say this and assume that I am miserable or that I'm drowning in regret or that I wish I could go back. I don't. But here's what I've had to learn. And maybe you have had to learn this too, or maybe this will be the beginning of you learning this.

Loving where you are now does not erase the grief of what's behind you. Both of those things can be completely true at the same time. You can be genuinely grateful for today and still mourn that something is gone. You can love the woman you are becoming and still feel the ache of the woman that you used to be. Grief and gratitude are not opposites.

They can live in the same heart at the same time. And pretending otherwise is just another way of avoiding the real work. And so those boxes and bins in my house, they are grief that I haven't fully sat with yet. And every time I walk past them, some part of me knows it. And so if you've ever stood in your home in front of a pile or a closet or a bin shoved under a bed, a drawer that you haven't opened in two years and thought, this isn't just stuff, this is part of

My life, this is part of me. Well, this conversation is for you. We are not going to be talking about bins and labels today. I want to be upfront about this. We are not talking about the best way to fold a sweater or which kind of organizer to buy for your pantry or how to do a whole house reset in a weekend. We're going to be going so much deeper than that. We're talking about why clutter can feel emotional, why letting go feels heavier than it logically should.

why some of us can clean out a whole garage in an afternoon, but cannot bring ourselves to open one cardboard box. And we're gonna talk about how to actually move forward without forcing yourself before you're ready and without staying so stuck that you never move at all. There is a middle ground and that's where we're going today. So let's start with the truth that nobody in the organizing world really wants to say out loud.

You are not struggling to get rid of stuff. You are struggling to let go of a version of your life that mattered. Let me say that again. You are not struggling to get rid of stuff. You are struggling to let go of a version of your life that mattered. Just let that sit. Let that land for a second.

Because here's what I know about you, about the women who listen to the conversations that we have here, who show up in community, who come to me for coaching and strategies. You are not lazy, and you are not disorganized at your core. You are not someone who simply doesn't care about your home or your space. You care enormously. You've tried the systems. You've watched the YouTube videos. You've bought the matching bins. You've done the weekend reset and felt great.

for about four days and then somehow you ended up right back where you started. And yet, there is still a room, a corner, a closet, a box that you keep walking past, that you keep not dealing with week after week, month after month, oftentimes year after year. This is not a time management problem. It's not a discipline problem or a motivation problem. It is not something that a better planner or a more detailed decluttering checklist is going to fix.

This is a grief problem. And grief does not care about what label maker you are using. So let me say a little bit more about this because I think we underestimate how many different forms grief takes in our lives and in our homes. We tend to think of grief as something that only follows death. And yes, that is absolutely one form of it. But grief shows up anytime we lose something that mattered.

Anytime a chapter closes, anytime who we were changes, even if the change is good. Grief shows up when your kids grow up and don't need you the same way anymore. It shows up when a career ends, whether you choose to leave it or it was chosen for you. It shows up when a friendship fades, when a marriage ends, when your body changes, when a dream doesn't happen the way that you thought it would. It shows up in the quiet spaces between who you used to be and who you are now, and it tends to collect.

physically in the corners of our homes that we can't bring ourselves to deal with. for me, those boxes and bins, they represent 18 years. They represent a specific rhythm that is completely gone from my daily life now. The chaos of the little kids, and I mean the real chaos, right?

The beautiful kind, the kind where you are perpetually exhausted and perpetually needed. And somehow both of those things feel OK, because at least you know exactly who you are and what you're all about. I was the mom with the babies, the mom in the thick of it, the one who knew where every single thing was, who remembered every appointment, who was the keeper of all the small and tender details of small and tender lives. And somewhere, somewhere in all of those boxes is that identity.

folded up along with all of those onesies. No more twirling little girls in the kitchen. No more boys looking up at me with that uncomplicated total adoration that only exists before the world gets to them. No more of that version of motherhood where I was the whole world to someone who was still small enough for me to carry. And I'm saying all of this out loud because I think a lot of you have a version of those boxes somewhere in your home.

and it might not be baby things at all. Maybe it's your mother's dishes after she passed away, and every time you open that cabinet, you feel the weight of her absence so acutely that you just close it again and move on. Maybe it's the boxes of your old work clothes from a career that you left. And they're not just old clothes. They're the version of you who felt competent and seen and recognized in a way that felt good and that you quietly miss, even though you love where you are now.

Maybe it's your kid's artwork stacked in bins for a season of homeschooling that is over now. Maybe it's your wedding album in a box in the back of your closet from a marriage that didn't survive. And looking at it feels like looking at a woman you barely recognize anymore and don't quite know how to deal with. Maybe it's the medals and the gear from a sport that you used to love before your body changed or your schedule changed or life got impossibly full. It doesn't matter what the stuff is. The stuff.

It's never really about the stuff. The season is what we're holding. The identity is what we're not sure how to release. And so the very first thing that you need to do before you touch a single item, before you buy a single bin, before you make a single decision about what stays and what goes is this. Name what those things represent. Name what it represents, not what it is.

But what it represents, ask yourself, what season does this belong to? What version of me lived inside this? What was life like when this was part of my everyday world? What did I believe about myself then? What role was I playing? What did I love about who I was in that chapter? You don't have to answer all of those questions and immediately spring into action either. But you do have to stop pretending that the stuff is just stuff.

Because if you go in treating it like it's just stuff, one of two things is gonna happen. You will either avoid it forever because every time you try it feels like too much and you don't know why. Or you bulldoze through it so fast that the grief catches up with you later, weeks or months down the road. And you find yourself grieving something that you let go of before you were really ready. Neither one of those things is going to serve you.

And so name the season. Acknowledge what you're actually dealing with. That is where you want to start. Now let's talk about avoidance, because I honestly need to be honest about my own avoidance before I say anything else. I have been working around all of those boxes and bins, not through them, but around them. I have reorganized the closet that they're in. I have cleaned the room that that closet is in.

I have looked at them and thought, wow, I really need to deal with those. And I felt a small wave of something uncomfortable. And then I found something else very important and very urgent to go do. I have been masterful at the art of productive avoidance, staying in motion, checking other things off the list, feeling like I'm making progress while those boxes and sit exactly where they have been sitting, untouched, year after year. And here's what I finally had to admit when I

truly got honest with myself, those boxes are not neutral. They are not just sitting there quietly minding their own business. They are not inert objects with no effect on me. Every time I walk past them and choose not to deal with them, they do something to me. They pull at something. They hold me quietly in a version of life that is already over. And every day I choose to work around them instead of through them is a day that I avoidance

Make a decision that I should be making for myself. Now, and I want to be careful here because this part really matters. I am not telling you to rush grief. You do not rush grief. Grief has its own timeline and its own wisdom, forcing yourself to sit down with a box of your mother's things on a random Tuesday afternoon because you heard a podcast episode. That's not the reason that you move. That is not what I'm asking you to do.

That kind of forcing usually just results in either shutting down, shutting down completely, or making decisions that you later regret. Again, neither one of those is the goal. What I am saying is that there is a real and important difference between honoring the grief and building your life around avoiding it. Honoring grief sounds like this. I'm not ready to go through these yet, and I'm giving myself intentional space and time to get there.

It's a choice with direction and decision behind it. There's awareness. There's gentleness. Even without a hard deadline, there is intention in what you just said. Avoiding grief sounds like this. I'll deal with it later. Said on repeat, time and time again for three years. One of those is an act of genuine compassion towards yourself. And the other, it's just fear dressed up as compassion.

And here's the hard part. They can look, both of these two things can look almost identical from the outside, which means you have to be willing to be honest with yourself about which one you're actually doing. No one else can answer that for you. Here's a question that might help you figure it out. What am I avoiding and why? Not just in your closets and your storage room, in your life broadly. What are you walking around instead of walking through?

What are you managing instead of addressing? Because I've worked with enough women to say this with confidence. The physical avoidance and the emotional avoidance are almost always connected. The women who cannot bring themselves to deal with certain spaces in their homes are almost never just people who don't like sorting through boxes. They are women who have learned, often very skillfully, to navigate around hard things rather than move through them.

And that pattern does not stay contained to the storage room. It shows up in the relationships they're not addressing, in the feelings they're not processing, in the conversations they keep putting off, the changes that they know they need to make but can't seem to start. The closet is never just a closet. So ask yourself this honestly. Is what I'm doing helping me move forward, or is it keeping me on pause? You don't have to have the whole answer.

today or the first time you ask that question. But you do need to be willing to ask the question and sit with whatever comes up. Because awareness is the first step. You cannot change what you will not acknowledge. The avoidance is not protecting you. It's just postponing the work. And the longer you postpone it, the heavier it gets. Not because the stuff itself gets heavier.

but because the story that you build around it over years of avoidance gets more complicated. What starts as a box of baby clothes becomes, over time, a symbol of everything unresolved. It stops being something that you sort through, and it starts being something that you brace yourself against. That is a much harder problem to work with. Deal with it while it is still just a box. Okay, so.

Just when you thought we couldn't go any deeper, we're gonna do that, right? This is the part that I most want you to hear. This is the reframe that I think changes everything if you let it. Letting go is not the same as losing, but I know that it doesn't feel that way when you're standing in front of something that carries real weight. When you're holding onto something that belonged to a season that mattered deeply.

It can feel like releasing the object means releasing the memory. Like if you let the physical thing go, you'll lose your grip on what it represented. But that is just not true. Keeping the object does not protect the memory. And releasing the object does not erase it either. The memories that live in those boxes, the specific weight of a sleeping baby on your chest, the way that they smelled fresh out of the bath,

The sound of small feet on hardwood floors at six in the morning when the whole house was quiet and the day hadn't even started yet. Those are not stored in the stuff. They are stored in you, in your body, in your nervous system, in your laugh lines, in your instincts, and the way that certain songs or certain smells can take you back to a specific kitchen in a specific season of your life that you will never forget because it shaped everything about who you became.

The onesie is not the baby. The diploma is not your career. The album is not your marriage. The gear in the garage is not the athlete that you were. You are the keeper of those stories, not the stuff. And so what you're really doing when you choose to release an object is choosing to carry that season differently, not setting it down and walking away from it.

not pretending that it didn't happen or that it didn't matter, but choosing to carry it in a way that doesn't weigh you down, that doesn't weigh down your present or quietly block your future. You are deciding to hold it inside you where it has always truly lived anyway, instead of in boxes stacked in a room that you avoid. And here is something that I believe all the way down to my core. The version of you who lived at that season, who lived during that season does not disappear.

because you release an object. It doesn't disappear because you release a onesie. She, that woman, is woven into every single thing about who you are right now. The way that you love people, the depth of patience you've developed, the things you know about yourself and about life because of every hard and beautiful and ordinary moment that you walked through, the capacity for the joy that you carry.

the scars that you earned, the grace you learned to extend to yourself and others. She is there. She is you. You don't have to hold on to the box to hold on to her. This is actually one of my core beliefs about transformation. I don't help women become someone new. I help them return to who they've always been. The work is about reconnection, not reinvention, and releasing the stuff

from a past season is part of that reconnection. You are not shedding yourself. You are integrating yourself. And so here's what this looks like practically. It looks like curating instead of purging. And I've got three steps for you here. Kind of three things to remember. Number one, do not approach this like a rip the bandaid off exercise where the goal is to empty the room.

in one heroic afternoon. That is not the goal. The goal is intentionality. It's moving through it with your eyes open and your heart present, making real, considered decisions instead of either avoiding indefinitely or bulldozing through without actually feeling anything. Number two, choose a few items, maybe one per child or

One that represents an entire season or a small collection that holds the full story. And keep those intentionally. Not a roomful. Not everything. Not every single thing, right? A curated few things that carry the weight of the chapter without needing you to drag the entire chapter into your next one. And here's the most important piece of how to do this well. This is number three.

Tell the story first, then make the decision. What does this look like? Pick up the item, hold it in your hands. Let yourself actually feel what it brings up instead of shutting that down and pushing past it. Tell yourself the story of it, where it came from, what was happening in your life when it mattered, what it meant to you, who you were in that season. Give it a real honest minute or two, not a rushed one, not a

OK, I feel like moving on now kind of minute. Give it a real minute and then ask this. Do I need this object to hold this story? Or is the story already safe inside me without this? Sometimes the answer is going to be, yes, I actually do need this object to hold this story. And so then keep it.

Some things genuinely belong with you, and keeping them is the right intentional choice. That is completely valid, and it requires no justification. But sometimes, and this is the part that actually surprises people, in the process of actually telling yourself the story out loud, you realize that the story is already safe. You realize that you're not going to forget. You realize that you carry this season so thoroughly and deeply inside you that releasing the object

It actually doesn't threaten anything at all. And so in that moment, letting go can feel less like a loss and more like something settling, like finally putting down a weight that you didn't realize was still on your shoulders. That is what we're working towards. And there is one more important thing that I want to say. And this is the part that convicted me most when I finally got honest enough to say it out loud to myself.

You do not need to keep everything to prove it mattered. It mattered because you lived it. You do not need to keep everything to prove it mattered. It mattered simply because you lived it. The proof is not in the box. The proof is in you, in your instincts and your perspective and your depth and your laugh and all the things you know about yourself and about loving people and about surviving hard seasons because of every single moment that you have walked through.

None of that is stored in cardboard. It is stored in the woman who looks back at you when you look in the mirror. And here is where I have to be fully transparent with you about where I actually am right now with my own stuff. I know that keeping all of those boxes is costing me something. It's throttling who I'm becoming. When I realized that, when I actually said that to myself a few weeks ago, it really stopped me and made me think. Because I say a version of

I say a version of that to clients all the time, that staying emotionally anchored in the past costs you your presence in your life now. And there it was. I was doing exactly that, not in a dramatic way, not in a way that anyone else could really even see from the outside. But those unopened boxes were quietly holding part of me in a season that I'm not actively living anymore. And every day I walked past them without making a real decision was another small vote.

for staying on pause, another quiet signal to myself that I wasn't ready to fully step into what's next. And I don't wanna keep sending myself that signal. And I wonder if you've been sending yourself a similar one. Here's what I want you to hear before we end this conversation today. You are allowed to honor the past completely and still step fully into your present. Those two things are not in conflict with one another. You are not,

betraying the season that shaped you by releasing the physical remnants of it. You are not being disloyal to the version of yourself who lived it. You are not saying that it didn't matter or that it wasn't worth holding onto. You are saying it mattered so much that I carry it with me everywhere I go, in everything I am. And I don't need a cardboard box to prove that.

So here's what moving forward actually looks like, practically speaking. Set a gentle boundary with yourself, not a harsh one, not a this has to be done by a certain date or I've failed kind of deadline, but a real one with real intention behind it. Maybe that means committing to one bin at a time, one shelf, one box every other weekend. Maybe it means giving yourself a season, like by the end of the summer or by the end of the year.

to work through a particular space, not all at once, but in consistent, manageable steps. Give yourself explicit permission to not do it all at once. This is not a weekend project. This is grief work. And grief doesn't run on your productivity schedule. It takes the time it needs, and it takes the time it takes. And the kindest thing that you can do for yourself is to stop expecting it to be faster than it is.

Stop treating it like a task to complete rather than a process to move through. But here is one concrete thing I want you to do coming out of this conversation. Schedule the first touch, not the full decision, not the whole afternoon, just the first touch. Put it on your calendar right now today. Blackout 30 minutes or 10 minutes. Go to the thing that you've been avoiding. Open it.

Look inside. Let yourself feel whatever comes up without judging it or rushing it or trying to problem solve your way out of it immediately. That's it. That's the whole assignment from this conversation. Because here is what I know from doing this in my own life and walking alongside women who are doing it in theirs. Most of the time, the thing that we have been dreading is not as devastating as we built it up to be in our own heads.

The anticipation is almost always worse than the actual experience. That box has been gathering weight in your imagination for years and years. And when you finally open it, yes, it's going to bring up some feelings. Yes, it's tender. Yes, it might make you cry. But you are still standing on the other side of it. You did not fall apart. You are still standing there. You handled it. And something in you knows.

on the other side of that, that you are stronger than the avoidance was telling you that you were. You do not find that out by continuing to walk around the hard thing. You only find it out by walking toward it and stepping inside it. So let me bring this all to a close for us today. If you have a box somewhere in your house or a closet or a room or a corner that you've been finding reasons not to deal with because it means something,

I'm not gonna tell you to rip the band-aid off, and I'm not gonna give you a seven-step system or a cheerful challenge or a pep talk about how you've totally got this. But what I am going to do is ask you one question. Are you ready to stay here? Or are you ready to start stepping into what's next, free of the stuff that represented a time and a version of you from the past?

because there is a version of your life available on the other side of this work. Not a perfect version, not a version where grief disappears or the past stops mattering, but a version where you have moved through it with your eyes open and your heart present. Where you made real decisions instead of letting avoidance make them for you year after year, year after year.

where you chose to carry your past in a way that serves the life that you are living now instead of quietly complicating it. That version, it doesn't require you to forget. It doesn't require you to minimize what was or to pretend it didn't shape you profoundly. It just requires that you stop letting the unopened boxes hold a vote in how you live today. You don't have to do it all at once.

You don't have to have it all figured out before you start. But maybe today, just today, maybe today could be the day that you open the box. And if you are someone who struggles with clutter, make sure that you have downloaded my free Clutter Languages Guide. You can find it at clutterlanguagesguide.com. It's going to help you know what's going on underneath that clutter. And one of those clutter languages is emotional. One of them is about being a sentimental saver.

What we've done here today, it hasn't been about getting your home organized. But what we've actually done is we've opened the conversation, we've started the conversation about creating real space for the life that you are actually living right now. This is exactly what I help women do. But we don't just build systems. We do the work underneath the systems, the mindset work, the identity work, the grief.

the letting go, the figuring out who you are now and what you actually want the next season to look like. Because none of the structure matters if you are still emotionally anchored in a season that has already passed. You can go to clutterlanguagesguide.com or just look down in the comments below. We've got it linked there. So today I think has been a little bit heavy. But at the same time, I think today,

has been a little bit of a relief for you as well, because you finally understand what's actually going on. That's what I do here. Every single time I show up here to have conversations with women just like you. And if you know other women who need to have conversations, sometimes the hard, heavy ones, be sure that you share this conversation with them. You know who she is. She will thank you for it later. So friend, it's not about doing it all. It's about

understanding what's happening and giving yourself the grace and the space to do it well. And it starts with the understanding that you now have. And so until we talk again, make it an intentional day.