Holding On (or When Is It Time To Donate Old Clothes?)

When I lived at my old apartment, my closet was so big, you could fit a bed in there (seriously). I kept all my clothes in there, even those that didn’t fit because they were too big or too small. In my current house, my closet is tiny (people in the 1920’s didn’t have nearly as many clothes as we do now).

So under my bed, I’ve got these:

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They are giant under the bed clothing storage bags (you can tell that they are almost as long as my queen bed is wide).

In those bags, I’ve kept a lot of my “skinny” clothes. There are some things in there that I never got to wear (the white top with a blue Hawaiian print was never worn). Some of these clothes probably won’t ever be worn again because they are a bit out of style or I feel are a little too young for me. I should probably drop them off at Goodwill to get a tax deduction.

But I can’t seem to get rid of them.

I’ve got this dress that I loved in the summertime. Here I am wearing it at Disneyland.

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And this dress that I wore to my brother’s graduation from USC.

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I wore this dress to my Grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary dinner.

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And this dress was only worn once on the night after Thanksgiving one year for my Grandma’s birthday dinner.

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I’ve got my high school prom dress (I liked when I was the same size I was in high school).

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And I’ve got a bathing suit that I wore when I was very close to my goal weight in 2007 (I remember being so nervous to wear it because my scars from my hip surgery had not fully faded after a year).

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Some of these things, I probably will want to keep forever for sentimental reasons. But when I was digging though the bags over the weekend, I realized that some of these items would be perfect for the week I’ll be in Hawaii for my brother’s wedding next year.

I don’t want to make it a goal to fit into them, because if I don’t I’ll be very upset and could be a bit depressed. But if I did manage to fit into them, it would be amazing.

I’m thinking about taking one dress out of the bag soon and keeping it in my closet as a test dress. Maybe as I keep losing weight (even though it’s still going slowly) I can see how much closer I am to fitting into it.

I know I need something other than the scale to test my progress and maybe this could be it.