When I first met Cassandra, she was adjusting to big-city life in Chicago as a fifty-something executive.
She’d taken the job—new city, new company—to jump-start her life again after a heart-breaking divorce.
Cassandra rented a temporary apartment for the first year to see if she was committed to Chicago and the role. After exploring the city and making a few new friends, she decided yes, Chicago was the place for her and started house hunting.
She fell in love with a small, modern steel and glass condo in a mid-century tower.
Without thinking about it too much, she had her storage unit contents delivered to her new home, anxious to be reunited with some of her cherished things she hadn’t seen in a year. I got the call soon afterwards:
“Rochelle, you won’t believe how BAD my stuff looks in here. Plus I’m bursting at the seams, but I don’t know what to keep and what to do with everything else. It’s overwhelming!”
It turns out, Cassandra was overwhelmed by more than just the massive amount of stuff: she was being confronted with her old (mostly unexamined) life, while making a fresh start. There was no way around it—she had to make some decisions.
A little background: Cassandra’s husband had left her for another woman. The exit was beastly and she fled to Chicago, throwing her post-divorce stuff in storage.
So there we were, in her gorgeous modern home with stunning views, surrounded by mounds of stuff from her prior life.
We started with the master bed since it clearly overwhelmed the tiny room.
“But I can’t just get rid of it—it’s one of the first things we bought together. We had it custom made.”
So I asked her to put her hands on the bed, close her eyes and imagine whether/how this bed would support the new life she’s building inTHIS condo.
After about 30 seconds—no downsizing block here—she opened her eyes and said “What was I thinking? This has got to go. Who can we donate it to?”
The rest of the purge went pretty much like that.
She kept her dining table and chairs, a couple of side tables and donated or consigned the rest of the furniture. She tackled the sentimental items with a few hiccups until she decided there were very little marriage memories she wanted to keep.
Once the space was cleared, she found herself newly energized to decorate her jewel box condo—the first space she’d ever owned solo.
Feeling optimistic, she made some new friends in the building and signed on for a bicycle tour of France with them; she loved that so much she started traveling more and meeting new friends with wider interests.
Refusing to be defined only by the past freed her to design her future.
