Confession time: I hate drawers. If I had it my way, I’d hang everything up in my closet. I hate folding stuff. I’ve never worked in clothing retail for a reason. I find folding tedious, and I’m not particularly good at it, and something about it stresses me out. I wasn’t good at origami in seventh grade art class and I’m not good at folding a shirt, ok? I am flawed.
Unfortunately, I need drawers. Most of us need drawers. So I had to figure out how to make peace with them. It’s really more the fault of the clothes than the drawers, and it’s not even the clothes’ fault: it’s the folding. F*ck folding. Except don’t. It’s important. It keeps your clothes in better shape, and keeps your life organized. Have you seen Wet Hot American Summer? (If you haven’t, you must; if you have and you didn’t like it, I’m not sure how I feel about you as a person. Do you hate laughter?) Take a cue from Gene, the cafeteria worker, and fondle your sweaters. I mean don’t get all weird about it, but learn to love the process.
I was in a sorority in college, and had multiple drawers full of Greek life t-shirts. On Tuesdays we wore letter shirts; on Thursdays we wore other sorority-specific shirts; the other days of the week, we could wear whatever we wanted, but at least one other day of the week involved some sort of Greek life couture. Ok, it’s a little Mean Girls, but it really made getting dressed easier, especially after a night at the bar. But I could never seem to find the t-shirt I wanted when I wanted it. You know how when you go to J. Crew and inevitably the sweater you want in your size is somewhere in the middle of the pile, and you pull it out and mess up the whole pile? Yeah, I didn’t want that to be my life every morning as I got dressed.
One day, I got fed up, and decided I needed to re-organize my shirt drawers. I took everything out, and spent a lot of time thinking about how I could get all my shirts in there in a way that I knew where everything was, and that I didn’t mess up everything that was folded. So I came up with a different way of folding and putting things away. And it worked. Ta-da!
Look at that! They’re all lined up like little soldiers. It’s magnificent! I can see it all! And, I’m told there is some other closet guru out there who recommends a similar thing. Well, mazel tov to you, my sister in organizational arms, fighting the good fight. If only I had started blogging about folding t-shirts in college, as opposed to studying for the LSAT and going to sorority meetings, the world might be a different place right now. But here we are, and I think there’s room in the organizing world for both of us.