Throwing away old clothes

Emptying your wardrobe after years of piling up clothes and assorted fabrics is always a difficult task. All sort of memories seem to claw at you as you throw open one old cloth after another. The jeans you wore during your graduation, your prom dress, your favourite T-shirt when you were a teen, everything just gnaws at you and opens up a stream of memories.

It has always been difficult for lazy me to sort my wardrobe, arrange anything in order and for years it has become a home to homeless junk. So, one can find my old extra large purple T shirt from the days when everything I wore resembled a tent to my skirts and shorts when I had toned thighs. Old caps from the days when I used to dress up like a guy to clothes I had bought to not clash with my faux red hair. Dresses that are out of fashion but still amazing, traditional clothes from my various cousins’ weddings and weird clothes that make me go what the hell was I thinking!?

Taking each item and sorting through it, rejecting it and making the decision to finally throw something away is so tough. I have been avoiding this for years, carting the contents of my wardrobe from Delhi to Pune to Mumbai to Delhi and adding on to the mess. Sometimes it comes in use when you want to go all out and wear old clothes and mix them with something else, a la hippie look. And sometimes it becomes a battle in futility trying to fit in everything in the cupboard. Mostly it is a bone of contention with my family which complains that I have the biggest wardrobe with the littlest space. I cannot throw away my clothes. It’s a disease.

Some clothes have history, like my Harry Potter coloured ones, the red and yellows, the colour of Gryffindor, my wizard robe look-alike clothes, some are my artsy hippie clothes for the days when I feel like a vagabond artist and some are my inspiration to lose weight, the sexy itsy bitsy ones in which I have to fit in.

Maybe you are not meant to throw away old clothes, maybe you just need to keep them safe in your cupboard as memory aids and maybe you can convince your family that you do need a another larger wardrobe after all.