5 Things I Decluttered Immediately at 25

Turning 25 is a milestone, and milestones are a great time for reflection and taking stock of what you own. Your relationship toward material possessions and clutter has grown alongside the rest of you after all, so what matters to you and serves you today will be different than what you loved and needed in your teens. Here are five of the things I got rid of when I turned 25, as well as why. What you remove from your life may differ from my experience, but considering these items could be a great starting point if you’re looking to pare down.

There were a number of items I owned from my childhood that weren’t particularly sentimental, but I felt unable to give them away because I had them when I was a kid. Perhaps this is something you can relate to, feeling somewhat bound by the idea of sentimentality when in fact the items themselves don’t really even elicit a sentimental response from you.

I decided to thank these items and let them go, telling myself that once they were released from my life they could be out there in the universe actually making a child happy. They weren’t serving me as a 25-year-old and mainly lived in my underbed storage. Now they get another chance to be loved.

I went through a bit of a phase of keeping clothing I looked good in, even if the items weren’t the most comfortable. I don’t regret it as I enjoyed wearing the pieces, but I decided now was the time to let go of the majority of them as I care far more about being comfortable than my appearance. I put this down to the mental growth I’ve gone through over the years, going from an insecure girl who cared a lot about how she looked to someone that honestly doesn’t really care what others think of her outfits. If I like them and feel good in them, I wear them. That’s what matters!

When I last sifted through my closet I noticed that somehow I still had some hangers made for children’s clothing. My smaller clothing pieces fitted on these fine, but others ended up slipping off and frequently finding a temporary home on the floor.

I decided to declutter any hangers that weren’t made for my clothing — the clothing I love that fits my body — and get ones that were designed for adult-size clothing. It was nice to see my wardrobe more orderly, of course, but something felt good internally about switching to age-appropriate hangers. It was like I was honoring the fact that I am now a woman in a way, as the clothes didn’t look disproportionate to the hangers and made me ponder my body image when they didn’t fit.

I’m never going to be an out-of-this-world chef, and at 25 I accept that. I like baking, and I’m not bad at cooking by any means. It’s just that I prefer to stick to more simple meals and don’t devote my weekends to exploring obscure new recipes that warrant needing a kitchen filled with all kinds of cookware.

If an item in my kitchen didn’t make my life easier, I let it go so someone else could enjoy it. My chopping board actually ended up in the bin. I’m not sure what material it was made from, but it started to gather mold from being in the dishwasher only overnight. That doesn’t equal ease, nor health!

These are the items that do the job fine but are a pain in the process: those leggings that fit but shrunk in the wash so the end of the legs ride up after you move around for a while, that frying pan with the peeling coating you swear you can get a few more uses out of — you know the drill.

As much as these items function to you, they optimally don’t. I decided to take stock of these in my life, letting an amount of them go and earmarking others to use until they really need to be replaced. Life is too short to surround yourself with items you don’t enjoy wearing or using, and I had fun choosing out replacements that I actually felt excited to coexist with.