A closet redo as therapy. In which I start having mini-freakouts whenever I go into my closet, and then do something about it.
published 2026-03-15 by Brad Dobson
As I changed clothes my eyes wandered around our bedroom closet and I realized just how many different emotions were surfacing, and just how strange that was.
Stream of consciousness happened.
Clothes - old and new, including the stylish patterned shirts I love to wear - from my days before gaining a bunch of weight.
Multiple strata of hiking, cycling, running, and triathlon clothes. Old race shirts.
Aspirationally-sized clothes purchased while I was getting bigger, holding on to hope that I wouldn’t widen even further.
Worn out dressers and Container Store open-wire baskets that made the moves from Plano to Goleta to Loveland.
Contractor-grade shelving bowed in the middle holding extra suitcases, unused packs of ancient winter gear, family albums, and unopened boxes from our last move.
Emotions around memories and nostalgia, being overweight, clutter and overwhelm, desire to improve the closet, worry about the cost to improve it.
All of it tells a story. A ski jacket that returns me to visions of Whistler-Blackcomb thirty years ago. That suit I wore once at my brother’s wedding. The suit I wore at my wedding. The rain shell and pants I wore hiking back down from Long’s Peak in the rain.
I’m hanging on to too much. Some of it is “I will lose this weight and I want to wear that again when I do”, but some of it is nostalgia for those memories of a younger me. This realization snuck up on me: I try to be pretty choosy about things I keep for memory’s sake. When I think about it I’ve had to ask Minette for help in the past to get rid of old clothes. I guess I form a bit more of an emotional bond with clothes than other things.
At some level the clothes we hold on to represent an attempt to bring solidity to a world of impermanence, which inevitably ends in suffering.
Do they “spark joy”?
Will they be useful in the next year?
Are they worn out?
This is also about completing our move, ongoing upkeep and improvements, having a house we enjoy, and the attic access I promised myself I wouldn’t use to store stuff.
I need this closet to be functional, to be a place where I can find nice, appropriate clothes, where it isn’t a battle against myself to just get dressed.
When a home is a place of empowerment, it becomes … a story where we choose which parts of our past to let go of and which to carry forward. [Our homes] can be living, evolving embodiments of the story we choose to live.
— “Find Yourself At Home”, Susan Grosvenor
Two trips and a couple thousand dollars to The Container Store, a few days worth of tearing out the old, repairing sheet rock, repainting, installing new shelves, throwing out old clothes, and sorting keepers into different baskets ... and now I can walk into our bedroom closet without having a mini-breakdown. I think the pantry may be next.