The following is an interview I conducted with a friend, Theresa Manavalan, who is the executive editor in charge of the lifestyle pages at the NST. Sorry, Theres, I don’t remember your exact designation. We were talking about decluttering and she told me that 18 or so months ago, she had embarked on a crusade against clutter. Being smart, funny and articulate, I thought, what better way than to celebrate my decluttering week (OK, so it’s a three-day week, so what?) than with an interview with Theresa. So I whipped out my trusty (but now increasingly whipped) digital tape recorder and secondly asked the sage to tell me all about it. Below is the transcription of the interview. Theresa is an editor who doesn’t need to be edited:
18 months ago, I bought my last garment. Has the number of clothes in my collection gone down? No. Has it gone up? Yes. Every visiting auntie will bring me something; my husband constantly shops on my behalf; my sister buys a dress or a blouse and decides, ‘oh I don’t like it anymore, here, you can have it.’
That’s it. And it grows. I told myself no new handbags, no trinkets. Shoes, you cannot help it because they wear out. When you really need shoes, you’ve got to buy them.
I reached a point when I felt I had too much stuff. How much of this was actually valuable to me? Nominal. It was just stuff and the trouble with stuff is that you’ve got to put it somewhere. Did this mean I would have to buy a new cupboard to put all this stuff?
Forget it!
That was maybe two years ago. So I decided to do something about it. In short, I decided to declutter. I started with my wardrobe.
I told myself that for work, I would need maybe 14 to 15 sets of clothes so that I can use them twice a month. I looked at all my clothes and asked myself how many of these need to be dry-cleaned? That means, if I buy a RM100 blouse, every time I dry clean it, I spend RM10. So my RM100, became RM110, then RM120, then RM130 and so on. It’s what I call a high maintenance garment. Bad. You’re just spending cash unnecessarily.
If I buy a blouse from the pasar malam which costs me less than RM40 , it will fall apart in six months; it will get tatty and faded. You know the issues with cheap clothes, right? On the other hand, you can get a very nice pair of trousers from Marks & Spencers which will last five years and I’m wearing it at the rate of twice a month. That really is a very good deal.
See, if I buy a blouse, a garment for RM60 at the pasar malam, and I wear it for 6 months, it costs me RM10 a month. So if I multiply the rate of wear for the Marks & Spencers RM200 trousers, twice a month for five years, I would get a much better rate of return.
So dry cleaning is a bad idea. And I don’t even want clothes that require hand washing because that’s takes time. So good-quality machine-washable clothes. Wear them to death and chuck them. That’s the way. Never develop a sentimental attachment to your clothes.
I looked in the cupboard and found I had something like 20 tee shirts. And I only wear three. What were the other 17 doing there? These were the questions I was asking myself.
I put a little cardboard box inside my closet. Every day, on a daily basis, I actually discard garments. If I know I’ll never wear these pants again, because it’s ugly, faded, damaged, something went wrong, too fat, too thin, whatever, I put it in today. Not on spring-cleaning day. Today. If the bra strap breaks, nobody’s gonna repair a bra. Put it in that box. Underwear tears, who’s gonna repair underwear for you? Nobody. Into the box.
Between me, my husband and my little daughter, the box is full every month. At the rate of once a month, I can scoop up everything in there (I never dig and look again), drive to TMC where there’s a dog’s kennel for a charity box, just put it in. Clothes, shoes, I’ve also thrown away children’s books into that charity box.
You know free gifts? You go to the supermarket, you buy something and get a free gift? My house is Free Gift Central; I think we have free gifts from 1949, and when I examine some of those free gifts, they are collector’s items already. But the free gifts from my era are 99% plastic, so out they go. Free gifts go into another box and then in a couple of months when it fills up, I tie it up and it’s off to TMC.
A word of caution: Don’t show family members, don’t show children and don’t show mothers-in-law. In fact, never show anyone over 50. They’ll say, ‘aiyo, so cute’, and then they’ll keep it. Hoarders, all of them! And these are all plastic things of no real value. Chuck it! Off it goes to charitay!
Once my wardrobe was organized, I tackled my desk.
My paper mountain is still quite formidable. Things made of paper – letters, envelopes, cards, they just keep coming. Junk mail. I did the right thing. I switched from plastic bags to reusable bags. I go to do my grocery shopping and all my stuff is packed in these cloth bags, right? I come home, open and unpack it and you should see the amount of junk mail I now have. Brochures, flyers, coupon books; what do I need those for? Oh God! More junk and I have to throw it. I need Alam Flora more than ever. The cashiers just put it into the bags. Thick coupon book to cut coupons for discounts on things I don’t need.
So the other investment I made was a paper shredder. A small little home-use one which sits right next to my CPU on the floor, same height, same dimensions, I chose that purposely so that they could just sit together. I do not open letters and envelopes on the day they arrive. I have a designated day. None of my friends send me cards anyway, or letters. Everybody emails. So the only letters and things I’m getting are official stuff. So I know what it is. I know it’s my bank statement. I know it’s the City Hall assessment letter. So there’s no need for me to open it. There’s no surprise right? So just leave it there, in a basket, until the day of opening. Select one evening when I open all together. So my trash can next to me, look at the letter, do I need to keep it? No? Shred now. Very few things actually need to be filed. I’ve been attempting to push most of this online so one by one I give up the physical statements.
That’s why I have the shredder and a trash can only for paper. When the bag is full, I put it in one of those paper recycling bins. Even the shredded pieces. But these can also be used for stuffing. When I was cleaning out the closets, I found 21 brandy glasses in my mum-in-law’s cupboard. Real goblet-style snifters. Those days it was very fashionable to have it. Those days people actually drank brandy. So I packed them all away into a cardboard carton and I used my shredded paper to pack them. And I labeled the box: brandy glasses/21. If you need them, take them out.
And I make sure that the bathroom and dressing table surfaces are organized. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but for some people, the dressing table and the bathroom tables are full of bottles and shampoos. Too much. I refuse to open a new thing until I finished the old one. The old one must go into the trash, then you open the next one. But I noticed a lot of people open things before the old ones finish.
What are the effects of decluttering?
I feel so much better. The space on my table is clear and there’s only my potted plant there. It looks like a photo in a magazine. It doesn’t look like a terrace house in Jalan Kurau where’s there’s papers piled on the porch right up to the ceiling. You know that feeling? You drive past that house and it bugs you. Why? Because it’s clutter.
And other people’s clutter bugs you as well, right?
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