I recommend only biting off small bites – a box here and there a day – and you’ll gather momentum. It will get better!

I just got rid of MY icing set. In my case, it was my mother’s from the ’50s or ’60s, and she was killed a couple of years ago, so it was really hard to let it go. But she’d actually given it to me about 15 years ago and it sat on the same shelf, untouched, all that time, so it was time to donate it to someone who might actually use it.

Then, there’s the art room/library. Yep … same problems you were talking about! I have the half-finished cross stitch projects that I haven’t touched for 12 years. And I have a 20-ft. wall of 7-ft-tall bookshelves filled with books (not just normally, but every shelf has TWO ROWS of books, one in front and one behind it, because I have so many books and the shelves are 15″ deep).

But I also have a 26′ x 30′ garage filled with supplies for never-started projects, too. More cans of paint than I can count, piles of wood that I had cut to very specific sizes for tables and shelves I was going to build one day, AND all of my mom’s possessions that I stupidly did NOT get rid of when I hired the remediation company to clean out HER house (she was a hoarder, too). I really wish I’d walked away from it all, especially the piles and piles of papers and receipts that I was just convinced I had to go through piece by piece because there might be something important in them. (The few piles I went through, I found all sorts of loose $100 savings bonds, so I’m really paranoid that if I junk the piles without going through them, I’m going to be throwing away a million dollars or something.) So all that’s sitting in many boxes in the middle of the room.

Eesh, typing all that, now I’m hyperventilating again.

So how did your move turn out in the end?

If happiness is abou setting the goals that can be comfortably achieved, how would you push yourself further and do that which you thought you could not? Cause that feeling *is* exhiliarating.

So you falling short of your own goals is still well ahead of a huge proportion of the population, as far as what you get done.

If wealth is about living within your means, then maybe happiness is about setting goals that can be comfortably achieved, and being prepared to let go the ones that turn out to be less fun when you approach them.

LOL, you are so like my sister in this way. She is a mother with two part time jobs, is training for two or three marathons this year(including one in the US where you run a half marathon on day one and a full one on day two), and is worried that she is only getting distinctions on some of her Masters degree assignments.

Just reading about what you do wears me out!

Which is funny because actually, I have always fancied living in lots of different places and lifestyles. I’ve tried a few already. And ending up with someone in the navy kind of offers that opportunity to me, *which I always wanted*. So even though right now, this move is not the most glamorous, I am trying to see it as part of what I dreamed of – living in different places, in different lifestyles. I still need to embrace the seasideness of this place a bit more. I will in time. And when we find the dog beach.

So you really threw away half finished craft projects? Like in the bin? For knitting ones, I will happily unpick and then stash the yarn *for later*. But tapestries I have no idea what to do with. There are some that I just hate now. I would have no interest in finishing them for the joy of working on them and wouldn’t want to pay to frame them and then hang them on my wall. And I didn’t know you could just throw them in the trash?

I don’t really see anything wrong with decluttering now and then in ten years time reacquiring – technology changes (even with yarn dyeing), tastes and fashions change too. This is partly why I don’t like many of my WIPs and why I won’t like them in ten years time either. It’s why I’d like to finish things now with things I do like now, in case I don’t later – ticking time bomb of guilt.

Thanks for taking some! Seriously.

Stuff that I chucked? Boxes and boxes of paper, cardboard, cushion stuffing, styrofoam, wrapping paper and tubes of acrylic paint. Will I have to buy them again? Probably. But it’ll save me keeping them for 10 years. I also had a knitting phase, it’s over now. I threw out half-scarves, half-socks, half-blankets (well, that was more like one tenth of a blanket). I kept one tapestry on its frame, but I think next time I move I might be able to throw it out. Back then, I had no shelf of anthologies with my stories inside.

I have a feeling if I stood beside that shelf and asked myself which one I wanted more, I’d discover it was easy to put the tapestry frame on the junk pile.

But I understand the stupidness of buying things twice, and also the feeling of carving out chunks of yourself to send up on a kind of premature funeral pyre…poor Alisa! Change is not easy!