Too Much Shit, ADHD, & A Dorm Shoebox

TRIGGER WARNING: mentions of familial/domestic abuse.

F19. I own too much shit. Far too much. It’s mainly clothes and little thingamabobs here and there. Either way, it’s too much. I don’t even want a lot of the shit I own. My mom’s preferred coping mechanism with her serial cheating husband was retail therapy, so I now drown in clothes. I’m not innocent either; I got the shopping bug too—just not for clothes, or as bad as my mom.

I have crippling inattentive ADHD. It presents as a perpetual failure to clean things. My room, my body, my mind…you name it. Honestly, a lot of my life needs to be unfucked, but one of the main roots are my physical possessions. Everything gets so messy, so quickly! It’s terrible…and it’s so hard to keep organized because brain no worky well. I recognize I need to try harder, but I’ll be honest, there’s so much cluttering my mind and my physical space, so it’s really hard to stay on top of things. I’d like to note that I’m in therapy and it is helping.

To make matters worse, I live on campus at a very rigorous college. My belongings are split between my tiny room at home and my shoebox of a dorm room, so I never know what I’ve left at my house and my dorm. The spaces I have access to are remarkably small, and I have vast amounts of stuff. Just heaps! Piles!

So, here’s my action plan, and I could really use some encouragement from all of you.

I’m developing an exit plan from my abusive home. I also have no money. Thanks to my mom self-medicating at our local consignment shop, my clothes are pretty high quality (think brands like Free People, Anthropologie, etc). My plan is to sort out my clothes on the basis of whether the clothes “serve me”. If it does, I obviously will keep it.

If it does not, I will consider if that is due to my weight. (I grew up fat. I am currently trying my best to lose weight, and a lot of my clothes are too small for me. Despite my inability to wear them, I’ve been guilted into keeping them by my family.) If it is too small for me, AND I think it’s cute, I will keep it. If that’s not why, I will either donate it to my campus’s free market, or sell it on one of those gig economy resell apps, like Depop or Poshmark. That way I can unfuck things and get some much needed money, or at the bare minimum get this shit out.

I also need to look into better dorm storage options, as well as simply throwing out the shit I no longer need. I feel a lot of guilt and grief and body insecurity about the stuff I own. It’s all tying me down to a messy mind, and reminding me of my dysfunctional family. I can’t feel that way anymore. I need to change.