Me & My Garbage Anxiety

The writer Emily Mester had a pile of unwanted clothes sitting in purgatory in her office. Some items, she reasoned, she probably should just donate. Others were in good enough shape to trade in at a place like Beacon’s Closet. And more items still were nice enough that maybe she could have sold them properly on a site like Depop or Poshmark. But thinking about how best to optimize their departure turned her brain into something like a computer’s spinning rainbow wheel of death. “Because of that hesitation, they’ve been there for two years,” Mester says when we first connect. “Then I had this dark thought: Wait! I could just throw these away! I can literally just put them on the curb. Which I haven’t done, because that feels violent — like disposing of a body.”

Eventually, she got rid of the pile. She sold most of it to Buffalo Exchange for about $180. (“A sum that felt both gratifying and sobering,” she tells me later, “because if they took only half the clothes I brought, and a small fraction of that was worth $180, how much money have I spent?”) She sold some leftovers at Beacon’s Closet, then took the rest to a Salvation Army in Brooklyn, “where 10 feet before I got to the door, a man ran up to me and asked me to give him the clothes instead,” she recalls. “I hesitated, my scam hackles raised, but then I realized that I was giving them away for free anyway. No scam could be had — I’d already abdicated my claim to them.” But the pile was finally no more. She was free.

Perhaps you can relate, or have similar piles and offloading sagas of your own. I’ve sought out Mester, the author of American Bulk: Essays on Excess, for a little garbage therapy regarding something that’s been weighing me down lately: When did throwing things away get so hard? I don’t mean deciding to part with something — that step is easy. Thrilling, even! I don’t have hoarding issues or online-shopping compulsions, I’m always looking to get more space out of my Brooklyn apartment, and I zealously subscribe to the golden rule of organizing: a place for everything and everything in its place. (A phrase I have no doubt terrorized my husband with for years when he inevitably turns our kitchen counter into a drop zone for mail.)

It’s figuring out how to best get rid of something, preferably at minimal cost to our boiling planet, that feels overwhelming to the point of task paralysis. I have never joined a Buy-Nothing Facebook group or even glanced inside one, but merely learning of their existence a few years ago has permanently affixed a new angel — or devil, it’s hard to say — on my shoulder who’s constantly beckoning about a superior way to unburden myself: Rehome it! Donate it! Recycle it! Put it out on the street with a “free!” sign, even! To ignore that voice feels like nothing short of a moral failure. And yet, in the rare moment I get fed up enough to chuck a dust-collecting Amazon purchase in the actual trash, I don’t just feel relieved — I feel giddy, like I’ve gotten away with indulging in a forbidden pleasure. It is one of the most potent highs of my domestic mid-30s life (alongside canceled plans or learning that a movie I was going to see in theaters is actually now on streaming).

“The avenues we have to give things away often feel more like grieving rituals for us than viable ways for the thing to actually reenter the system.”

Even professional organizers feel the rub. “I’m still human, so I still go through that, especially around Christmas time. Everything just piles up,” says Christen Fackler, a self-described “neurospicy professional organizer” and content creator. “I even find myself thinking, ‘I’ve got to find the perfect home for it.’ And then there’s just that one day you can’t relax in your own home, and you’re like, ‘Why is one bag of trash [getting to me]?’ Just let it go. Because taking this rag to the ASPCA and taking this ball to Goodwill or all these little things — it’s just too much sometimes.”

Plenty of people have no problem living with some extra clutter. I salute them. I envy them! But for many of us living within America’s I-shop-therefore-I-am culture of consumerism, our stuff has meaning — it says something to us about who we are and what we value. Which also means the objects in our possessions that we don’t want can carry a psychic weight, a draining undertow. Fackler came to me like a wish from a genie while scrolling TikTok one day: In one of her videos titled “Throw It Away!”, she granted viewers permission to let a few garbage bags’ worth of stuff go without a second thought. “Don’t let clutter control you, be in control of your clutter,” she wrote in the caption. “I have released many clients who feel so guilty not sending items to the perfect home all the time.”

The most obvious contributing factor to what I’ll call junk paralysis is growing anxiety about climate change and the environmental precarity of Earth — which, we probably can agree, is a good concern to have. “The guilty feeling of throwing something away is largely an increasing awareness that it has to go somewhere,” Mester says. “A lot of reckoning with climate change has been everybody having to realize that things don’t just float out into the ether.”

“It is work, and here’s the maybe not so exciting or comforting answer: You’re obligated to do it. It is your responsibility as an individual who has the ability and means to dispose of things the proper way, to at least try.”

Complicating that factor, though, is increased awareness that there is no perfect system for getting rid of things amid those concerns. If I put this item in recycling, will it actually get recycled? Will the donation spot really find a new home for my stuff, or will they send it off to a landfill or another country to make it someone else’s problem? The solutions loop, compete with, and undermine each other. “It’s hard to give advice when there’s always something controversial about anything,” Fackler says. Even when I am most determined to do the right thing, doubts about the efficacy process lend the whole exercise an air of performance.

“The avenues we have to give things away often feel more like grieving rituals for us than viable ways for the thing to actually reenter the system,” Mester says. Growing up, her dad was an over-shopper: When his storage unit would fill up, they’d take a written inventory, photograph the items, and then bring them to Goodwill. “Goodwill didn’t even really want it” — the haul would “be a box of crap,” she says, or included good-condition items the organization explicitly did not take — “so I remember one time we did this clandestine night drop to Goodwill. I mean, there was valuable stuff in there, but the idea that it was helping anyone was so spurious.”

Her story reminded me of every time I’ve dropped a bag off at my local well-reputed donation spot and then raced away with the speed of a successful shoplifter, as if I might immediately get publicly shamed for depositing subpar goods. But if they don’t like what’s in there, I’d assure myself, surely they’ll have a better idea of what to do with it next?

The job of finding and researching a nearby place that will take your item — and reading the fine print of when and how and in what condition they’ll take it — can feel overwhelming (especially if you’re car-less in a big city). Faced with such a predicament, many people would rather throw money at the problem instead of fester in the guilt — and capitalism is on the case, in the form of not not tempting companies like Ridwell (whose mail-in recycling kits start at $30), TerraCycle (whose “Zero Waste Boxes” start at just under $100), or apparel-focused ThredUp to whom you can outsource the work of scouting and sorting.

In pondering the work of it all, part of me wondered if junk paralysis was really just millennial burnout in another form. But I suspect that line of thinking is less about meaningfully engaging with the concept and more about seeking an excuse to opt out — no different from muttering about how “carbon footprint” is propaganda by Big Oil to shift blame for climate change away from corporations and onto individual consumers while I throw away an empty hummus container I’m too lazy to rinse out. (See also: its sister incantation, “no ethical consumption under capitalism.”)

“Carrying the guilt and the shame, that just takes up energy in your body and distracts you from doing those other things that you could be doing to improve the lives of others or yourself.”

Figuring out the best way to get rid of something does take resources. Or, as journalist Alyssa Hardy puts it, “it is work, and here’s the maybe not so exciting or comforting answer: You’re obligated to do it.” Hardy is right to splash some cold water of reason on me. She’s been covering the environmental impacts of fast fashion and overconsumption for years, including at Teen Vogue and in her book, Worn Out: How Our Clothes Cover Up Fashion’s Sins. “When you truly see how detrimental clothing is within a global waste crisis,” she says, “it is your responsibility as an individual who has the ability and means to dispose of things the proper way, to at least try.”

The easiest place to start: being honest about what comes into your house. You don’t have to worry about getting rid of the object you never own in the first place. And you can apply that scrutiny to both individual purchases in a do-I-really-need-this way — on TikTok, you’ll find plenty of would-be shoppers curbing their spending by sharing lists of what they wanted to buy instead of simply pulling the trigger — as well as your habits at large. I didn’t think there were any notable patterns to my online shopping until I saw myself reflected in a passage of Mester’s book where she writes about the endless, alluring quest of self-improvement via home goods:

Our household needs were met, but each day I invented a new one. Rather than dissuade the buying, my environmental guilt lent it a new shape. We needed to switch from liquid to bar soap, we needed a self-draining soap dish, we needed to buy glass containers for our body wash and detergent, we needed a receptacle to store our plastic grocery bags, then we needed reusable canvas bags, alternatives to plastic wrap, alternatives to paper towels, alternatives to everything. A single twelve-dollar bottle of body wash wrapped in plastic and cardboard traveled thousands of miles to my doorstep, on ships and planes, then on trucks and more trucks, only to be rejected because I realized I wanted to buy a refillable version, to be more eco-friendly. So the process began again, the damage not reversed but doubled, and at the end of it, the bottle wasn’t resold, but thrown away too, because if I didn’t want it, why would anyone else?

I realized I too was always searching for a way to optimize my home by buying something: the closet organizers that would maximize storage and encourage me to actually wear all the clothes I own; the aesthetically pleasing dish rack that would make me want to do the dishes; the magazine rack that would make me actually pick up my subscriptions. Getting a handle on my stuff, it seemed, often required more stuff to hold or contain it. But when these items failed to fix my life in the way I’d secretly hoped — sorry to the New Yorker — I was left with cumbersome maybe-plastic goods or metal objects I didn’t know the best way to get rid of. No wonder I balked at trying to rid myself of them the right way: I was sick of optimizing. (“The system that sold you that stuff is not the moral authority on what to do with it,” Tessa Hughes, a decluttering coach, said in a TikTok video that helpfully acknowledged just how hard advertisers and corporations push purchases on us. “This is not an excuse to just continue overconsumption and then put it all in a landfill when we’re sick of it, but keeping stuff in our homes as a punishment or out of a guilt trip is not the solution.”)

Hardy is right: We should keep fighting the good fight by trying to get rid of our castoffs responsibly. But, amid all the complexities around capitalism and the environment and America’s addiction to stuff, perhaps there is room to give yourself grace, too. In her TikTok video, Fackler quoted some advice from KC Davis, a therapist and author of How to Keep House While Drowning: “You can’t save the rainforest if you are depressed.” In other words: Do your best — but if you’re beating yourself up day after day about the pile in the corner, you’re allowed a jailbreak every now and then (especially if you can use your newly freed-up mental bandwidth to offset your garbage sins in other ways).

“When I first started my business, I wanted to be that person for everybody and save every little piece of everything — and I couldn’t do it all. We can’t do it all,” Fackler says. “Carrying the guilt and the shame, that just takes up energy in your body and distracts you from doing those other things that you could be doing to improve the lives of others or yourself.” Marie Kondo famously told us to look for the spark in deciding what to keep and what to let go of. But if what you’re stuck holding onto is snuffing your own spark, you might find the answer in the trash.