I was putting away my laundry the other night and found myself wrestling items into a bustling PJ drawer. I felt like ‘enough already!’ (as we say when we are face to face with a toleration).
I pulled everything out, and sorted out the items I ENJOY wearing. (Cause when you are in your 40s, you decide that you should like what you wear and that includes liking how it feels to wear it)
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Now, for years my PJs have been whatever old shirt and old sweats had grown too worn to wear in my daily life + some wayward, warped-seamed PJ pants I bought here and there.
My approach has always been ‘use it all up until it doesn’t work anymore’ and my PJs represented the final lifecycle stage of my most mundane clothes. But, as I have paid attention over the past couple of years, I accepted that I don’t LIKE my pajamas . . . I don’t LIKE how they feel to wear. . . I don’t like having so much I can’t even fit things in the drawer.. . .I don’t like having these things!
This felt like a struggle to my frugalist heart.
I felt like I should aways “make due”, and not perpetuate the fashion machine that tells us everything we’ve had for longer than 7 weeks is no longer acceptable. It was like a form of resistance to wear crap clothes to bed each night. But….maybe I can protest in other ways.
So, I’ve slowly been invested in cozy, well-fitting, PJ sets and decided to unburden my space of the things that I am ‘tolerating’ and therefore make space for the things that bring me joy.
That has been hard for me to challenge this ‘make due’ mindset. But I do think of a TedTalk I had heard. This woman shared how she was living in France and had on ratty PJs and her billet parent scolded her ratty PJs. She told her that she should wear clothes she’s proud of, all the time, and so this woman embraced this French way. She bought nice PJs and she felt better for it.
That notion kinda left me feeling like, yes! I should have nicer PJs – but also, no! These things are still fine.
As I’ve thought about this over the years and looked at things in my life I was ready to ‘upgrade’ I’ve come to settle somewhere in the middle.
Because I don’t think we all have money to go and replace the contents of our PJ drawer.
And maybe it’s not that, I’m sure we could find the money – but is this how we want to spend it?
Because our finances are a resource too – and with all our resources, we need to steward them well and use them in ways that are in line with our PRIORITIES.
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(this after doesn’t show my new PJ sets, just the space I have for them when they come out of the wash)
So next time you are face to face with the idea that you need to go out and spend some money and replace things, or upgrade things I encourage you to touch base with priorities first
Because there are a lot of GOOD things we could spend our money on, but it should really all flow to the GREAT things rather than be spread out everywhere else.
For us, the way we do this is set out our vision and values each year .
Each New Years Conor and I sit and go through the areas of our life where we want to set some goals and vision (we use the Life on Purpose Workbook but a great start is also the Live Your Values and Live Your Vision worksheets).
There is a section on finances and this is a place I’ve been paying attention to my mindset on – because I’m learning that my finances need to flow inline with my values. This is where the bulk of our money will go and I need to let the other stuff be a lower priority (or no priority). I need to let my priorities be put into ACTION and sometimes that action is not clicking ‘add to cart’ on something that would be ‘nice’.
So, in my natural ‘take this somewhere it doesn’t need to go’ tendencies – decluttering my PJ drawer has reminded me that I need to review my spending priorities. And honour them.
This means saying no to myself on the things that others are doing that I tell myself ‘I should’ but it’s not actually in line with my priorities. Are PJs? Not so much. Likewise, letting myself trust in the abundance of spending money on things that ARE a priority to me.
👩🏻💻 Recently Decluttered is a feature periodically shared in the Simple Saturdays email. You can find the Recently Decluttered Archives here