To keep or not to keep - such a question.

Once again I am focused on de-cluttering.

My de-clutter history is limited to infrequent clean outs, sort throughs, pitching, donating re-org days. Whole days. Those days would be preceded by some big emotional event, a bad mood, or a major frustration that would launch me into a whorl wind of activity aimed at lighting my "stuff inventory". Lightening my stuff made me feel lighter and less overwhelmed. My stuff inventory still remains frighteningly high even after years of such frantic episodes. Obviously these clean out episodes haven't come frequently enough.

So I am breaking the "whole day" clean outs, and doing some stuff each day - areas that randomly come to my attention.

In addition, my previous habit of doing a "once thru" on evaluating what stays and what goes and calling it finished seems faulty for me. I did a once-through on books recently - got rid of alot. And when I looked at the "keep" books again a few days later, more popped out asking to be sent to a new home. I believe I get emotionally attached to stuff which clouds my decision making on "to keep or not to keep" and once I thin the crowd of things under review, doing a further review of the same stuff makes tossing stuff easier. And I always feel good making space, thinning the "stuff load" at my house.

Feeling good in getting rid of things is probably just a personal quirk of mine, but how do you handle the act of shedding stuff? How do you decide what to keep and what to toss? Are you a keeper or a tosser by nature? And how does it make you feel once you have lightened your load?

I am off to tackle some other areas that have come to my attention - pockets of belongings that are no longer needed in my life. And while I am doing this physical de-clutter task, I am doing a mental inventory of the same kind - deciding what to keep and what to discard so that I can lighten my load mentally and emotionally as well.