Have you ever gone to drop off a bag of donations, peeked inside, and thought, “Wait…did I actually mean to get rid of that?”
In honor of Halloween this week, I wanted to talk about one of the most nefarious clutter monsters hiding in your house…
The Donation Creep. 👻
This monster lurks next to your front door, in the trunk of your car, and piled up in your Room of Doom.
But the Donation Monster isn’t like other clutter monsters. It has a mischievous superpower that keeps itself rooted in your life, no matter how many times you swear you’re going to get rid of it once and for all.
It’s contagious. 🦠
While it’s sitting there in old shipping boxes, Trader Joe’s bags, and trash bags, it’s infecting the other items in your life.
The jacket you throw down when you don’t have time to hang it up. The box from Amazon you can’t remember if you’ve tried on or not. The random things you moved off the dining room table when your neighbor came by last month.
They all start to look like the Donation Creep.
And before you know it, you can’t remember what you meant to get rid of and what you wanted to keep.
The Donation Creep doesn’t just take up space. It takes up mental energy.
It takes the items you’ve already organized and decided to let go of and turns them into something you have to process and evaluate all over again.
Making the decision to let something go isn’t the same as completing the process of letting it go.
Of course, the best possible scenario is that you take your donations to a donation center right away. But that isn’t always possible.
Sometimes the organizing process takes so much energy that you don’t have anything left for a trip to the donation center. Maybe you don’t actually know where to take it. Perhaps you’re neurodivergent, and the final steps of a project feel especially difficult. Or maybe you simply ran out of time, and you told yourself that you would take everything next week.
Life happens. And there is nothing wrong with you if this happens. It happens to all of us.
Instead of beating ourselves up for not finishing, we can be patient and kind with ourselves. (Self-compassion is a surprisingly powerful antidote to clutter monsters!) AND we can create systems that keep the clutter monsters from taking over.
So, what’s the best way to stop the Donation Creep from taking over your house?
Lock. It. Down.
Seal those donation bags and boxes like they’re contagious (because they are). 😷
When donations are left in open bags and boxes, other things inevitably find their way into the mix. And suddenly, you’re faced with a whole second round of organizing you never asked for.
So, if you can’t take your donations somewhere right away, seal them up and label them clearly.
That way, whether you drop them off tomorrow or next month, you won’t have to second-guess what’s inside.
It seems overly simple, but this one little step can save you from having to make the same decisions all over again.
You don’t have to finish every part of an organizing project in one fell swoop. But you can protect the progress you’ve already made.
Seal it. Label it. Send it on its way.
The Donation Creep has haunted your house long enough. 👻
