You know what’s nice about movies and TV? They distill reality a little bit. We see what the camera captures; we don’t see all the dollies and the microphones and the actors taking off their wigs. That’s kind of how I feel about doing virtual consults. Even though you can see what’s going on, you don’t get the actual experience of being there. Everything else that’s happening beyond the scope of the camera’s lens isn’t there to impact you. That’s definitely how I felt when I got to The Professor’s place.
After her virtual consult, we came up with a seemingly reasonable plan of velvet hangers, clear shoe boxes, and learning how to fold and put stuff away. However, I walked into The Professor’s room and was overwhelmed. And this was after she told me that her mom had been to visit the week prior and had done some tidying up. To be sure, her mom tidied up, and I might have yelped something like “This is not as messy as it was on the consult!,” but it was still… something. I was up for the task, but felt as though I had not adequately mentally or physically prepared myself for the task at hand.
The Professor’s Closet Hang-ups
Let It Go. If ever there was someone who was a stack of magazines and a flattened cat away from an episode of Hoarders, it’s The Professor. There were various types of attachments to different things; some emotional, some financial, some sentimental. This was tough. All of her hang-ups, in some way, were offshoots of this one.
Not Ready to Make Nice. One of The Professor’s biggest challenges was that she had resigned herself to the way her place looked. This was how it had always been and this was how it was always going to be. I told her, in no uncertain terms, that I thought it was a lazy excuse for getting stuff done. She wasn’t ready to crack the whip herself. But that’s why she enlisted me.
You May Be Right. The Professor’s second biggest challenge was trust. She needed a lot of convincing about how to do things, why we should do it a certain way, and more than anything, getting rid of things. It took a bit of work to get her to come around and divorce herself from her reasons for doing things, and consider doing them the way in which I suggested. (This applies equally to her resistance to my insistence that we organize to a soundtrack of Broadway show tunes. Guess who ended the weekend prancing around with her jazz hands and singing “Don’t Rain On My Parade”? Mm hmm.)
Teaching The Professor the Process
The Professor and I had an emotional journey, and luckily we took this journey on a 3-day weekend, because we needed it. There was SO. MUCH. STUFF. It was hard for me to decide where to start. However, we talked, I did a second survey of her belongings, and hatched a plan. She has 3 bedroom closets, plus a closet in another room solely devoted to hoodies (I know), as well as tons of stuff in her dressers, and also, two random drawer units for stuff that didn’t fit in her closets or her dressers.
The plan was this: we’d start with the closets, and we would categorize clothing along the way. A pile for trash, a pile for donation, a pile for consignment, and other piles for clothes that belonged in another closet, or in her drawers. We also categorized what was going back into the closets: one for work wear; another for casual wear; another for dual-purpose clothing items; and another for luggage. (Advance apologies, Bitches. It wasn't until I'd uploaded the photos to my computer that I realized they turned out horribly blurry. The shame.)
Just getting through what we deemed her work wear closet took us four hours. However, those four hours set the stage for everything else. By hour three, The Professor was coming up with her own suggestions for where to put things or how to organize them, and by George, she even got rid of some things without prodding from me. Let’s get something straight: it’s rare for me to emphatically urge a client to get rid of something. But, The Professor had more stuff than she knew what to do with, quite literally. As she said in her own consult, she has tons of stuff, but rewears the same things over and over because she can’t remember what she has. A big part of our work was doing a hardcore closet edit. If we had taken a shot for each time I asked her “Why?” or given her a silent side-eye, we probably would’ve had alcohol poisoning halfway through the work wear closet. Somewhat miraculously, though, we did this all sober, although at some point each day we rewarded our hard work with ice cream. #LactoseIsLife
A lot of the work with The Professor was about reassurance, and letting her know that stuff that had served its purpose and held sentimental value didn’t necessarily need to be kept. The conversation went a bit like this:
The Bitch: Why do you want to keep that sweatshirt from college that was so awesome when you were in your sorority, but are you really going to wear it out of the house now as a thirtysomething woman? Are you going to obey the rules of wearing letters? (No sweating, sex, or getting drunk.) Probably not. Get rid of the dang letter sweatshirt. And why, God, why, do you need 100+ pair of socks and nylons? Are you covering the feet of a small village?
The Professor: Ummmmmm…
She needed help letting go.
But once she let go, she also needed help putting things away. I’m someone who tends to compartmentalize (both physically and mentally), and so I like structure around things. Coming up with categories for her closets and her drawers helped The Professor, too. Particularly since she said she was overwhelmed by her own stuff and it gave her anxiety, my goal was to put things away in a manner that made sense. I want her to be able to wake up in the morning and know exactly where her stuff is, or come home from work to change for a date with her adorable boyfriend and be able to grab and go. As someone who also has anxiety issues, I wanted to get rid of her triggers.
It was a lot of work. A lot of work. But when our three days were up, dare I say she had her Princess Jasmine moment, because her place was like a whole new world.