Thinking About Getting Into: Organizing

If you saw how many skincare products I own, you would most definitely think that I am a narcissist or an obsessive, or a person who has become deeply deluded into some higher scheme conducted simultaneously by society, the beauty industry, and my own self-doubt. However, the truth of the matter, I assure you, is different: I am a very frugal person.

Over the past two years or so, I have had the extreme benefit of acquiring countless products through my employment, as I cover beauty as one of my beats as a writer. But, there are only so many products that one person can use, and so, a good quantity goes to my mom, and some get passed along to friends. And still. There are so many that I can't quite give up.

Although I am a frugal person, I am a person who loves things. I love to have a lot of stuff. Material items bring me joy, and although I love to obtain things, I do not love to pay for things.

I do not want to pay for things. This is why I currently have five tubes of luxury toothpaste stowed in a storage crate under my bed.

The thing about loving things is that you could get very overwhelmed by them all at once, and that is why you need to have a system. The things must have an ecosystem of their own in order to ensure both their and your vitality, and this is the reason why I have now found myself fallen deep into the world of intense organizing.

I am here to tell you that folding your t-shirts extra-thin and slotting them into your drawer as if they were a DVD collection is going to change your life.

If keeping a (seemingly) clean home is doing your homework, then actually emptying out your drawers of junk, throwing away year-old mascara, and investing in under-bed storage is making flashcards, not cramming the night before, and waking up the next day knowing that you are prepared for whatever comes next.

I've been adrift since mid-August, when my time at my job came to an end, and I've been spending a lot of time in my room. I'm a homebody, and I always have been, and as I've been figuring out, planning, and mapping my next steps life-wise, I've become more and more conscious of the tiny messes that have built up around me: the inventory from my shop, all packed into different suitcases, the beauty products, piled on top of one another in drawers that I feared would one day collapse, the sweaters and tees and dresses that cascaded onto one another in my closet and dresser, threatening chaos. These things weren't obvious when I sat on my bed, doing work (or let's be honest, watching Terrace House). But I knew they were there, and I knew they needed to be handled.

Over the past two weeks or so, I've organized my stash of vintage-for-sale, and acquired rolling storage drawers for my hoard of products. I took all my dresses off their hangers and placed them, folded, color-coordinated, on hanging shelves, and disposed of things that I finally admitted to myself that I don't need.

When you organize, really and fully—no sneaking excess junk into an area where you hope you'll eventually forget about it—you end up throwing some things away, but more often than not, you realize that all your stuff has a way of fitting, if only you had thought about putting it together in a different way. You don't have to fundamentally change things to make them better—you just have to think of them in a new way that maybe you haven't tried before.

I'm at a point in my life where I'll admit that I don't always cope well with change (after all, I am a Taurus). It's something that I should have realized earlier in life—my long-term teenage crushes could have clued me into that fact—but now, I accept that stability is important to me. On the other hand, I love shifting and experimenting with my style, exploring new books and exhibits and ideas, and traveling to new places when I get the opportunity. These things can be true simultaneously: change is easy for me to handle, but only when I have power over it.

As I folded my shirts and rearranged my serums, I felt calm, collected. In the past month, I've experienced a lot of self-doubt—more than I have ever experienced in recent years—and going through my stuff made me reckon with the things I've amassed, physical and not, over my first two Real Adult years. I've collected more than I realized, and for a long time, I had assumed that I simply had no space for anything new or different—I've hoarded so much in preparation for the future that I imagined that I left no space for spontaneous acquisitions.

But then I organized. I tossed a few pieces of junk that were preventing me from creating the perfect ecosystem for my belongings, and I realized that now, I have some extra space in my t-shirt drawer.

I can think of a few new things I'd like to try out, and now, I know I have just the place for them.