I decided on my birthday that I was too fat and wanted to lose weight. I decided to get serious about my health and started making changes. I got serious again in April and joined and gym and got a trainer. I got even more serious in August and modified my diet drastically, but with changes I knew I could sustain long term. As a result, I’ve lost a few pounds and a few inches. (It’s actually more than a few, but that’s another blog for another day.)

As I prepare to clear my closet of clothes that no longer fit (almost 50% of all the clothes in my closet), I am realizing that more than my closet requires decluttering. I need to declutter my life.
Sometimes clutter accumulates without you noticing it. You’re going about your business managing all of the important things in life while the junk accumulates around you. Then one day you look up and there’s so much junk piled up that you have a difficult time navigating through it. That’s where I am now — trying to navigate through the junk.

When I say “junk” I’m not just referring to things. Junk can be anything you consider to be dead weight. That dead weight may come in the form of things, but most often it comes in the form of people and relationships. Somehow I’ve allowed relationships that have outlived their usefulness to linger. I shouldn’t say “somehow” because I know exactly how it happened. It happened because I refused to acknowledge that the relationships no longer served any useful purpose. Because there was no drama or incidents to validate the uselessness of the relationships, I didn’t feel like there was a good reason to end them. Then all of a sudden I realized that the clutter I felt, the junk I was having trouble navigating through, was in fact these useless relationships. If you don’t take away anything else from this blog, take this with you:

Having been friends with someone for a long time is not a good enough reason to remain friends with someone!”

Remembering that empowered me to get rid of a lot of dead weight. In addition to a closet full of clothes, I rid myself useless relationships. I’ve decided that if a relationship doesn’t add anything to my life (other than serving as a living, breathing reminder of what I don’t want to be), then I shouldn’t be in it.