How long has it been since you last tidied up your home?
I consider myself a fairly tidy person. I vacuum the carpets, wipe the floors, scrub the bathrooms, and clean the kitchen every single week. But when it comes to real decluttering — the deeper kind of sorting-through — it has honestly been a long while.
These past couple of days, moved by something I can't quite name, I suddenly wanted to sort through the drawers, cabinets, and dusty corners I normally never notice. Maybe the urge had something to do with my inner state — a wish to spark some small change in my life through the act itself.
So one evening, in a free hour, I did some overdue upkeep: I cleaned the bookshelf and nightstand I hadn't wiped down in ages, and while I was at it, I cleared out a lot of things I no longer use — small trinkets I'd bought years ago, notebooks long since filled, yellowing letters, and boxes I'd kept for reasons I could no longer remember.
Why We Hold On
As I sorted, my mind drifted to many of my clients. People often tell me that while clearing out a relative's room, they make a surprising discovery: the older person had quietly been a hoarder — belongings from thirty or forty years ago, sometimes older, all carefully kept. And amid the confusion and frustration this stirs up, many of them are struck by a further realization: "It turns out I do the same thing."
There's almost always a deeper meaning beneath the behavior. Why did we keep this particular thing in the first place? What does it stand for? When I sit with a client around a question like this, we look at what an object secretly carries — a feeling, a memory, a belief, a piece of who they are — and at the family patterns they grew up inside. Look closely, and a few core reasons tend to surface:
- Social, cultural, and economic factors. A person may have grown up with scarcity, where owning certain things signaled abundance — or been shaped by a culture that prizes "never being wasteful" and treats throwing anything away as a shame.
- Emotional and psychological factors. Many of us hold onto things to keep a sense of safety and control; when the rest of life feels unsteady, objects become anchors we can actually grip. Sometimes an object stands for our connection to a particular person, so that discarding it can feel like severing the bond itself. Long-term stress and trauma are common drivers, too.
Turning the Lens on Myself
Take me, for example. I'm not much of a hoarder by nature. Since moving abroad I've relocated many times, and when you own too much, every move becomes a burden — so I built the habit of parting with whatever I can. Yet in the years since I settled down and started a family, the very steadiness of daily life has let more and more quietly pile up around me.
During this clean-out, I noticed how slow I was to part with certain things, and that there were real psychological reasons underneath. Take the journal I finished two years ago — the kind of writing I so often invite my own clients to keep. I'd held onto it because it kept me company through an extraordinarily hard stretch of my life. My reluctance to let go seemed to conjure an illusion: "If I throw this journal away, am I throwing that whole experience away too?" And quietly, there was also a hope — that one day I might share it with my own children.
And yet, just before I tore out the pages one by one, I paused to leaf through them — and it struck me: these are all simply part of the journey, and a journey is never really thrown away. It goes on living in us, flowing through our lives in a different form. For me, saying goodbye to the journal in that moment carried its own kind of relief — a way of formally declaring that I had finally graduated.
Saying Goodbye to My Old Glasses: Roots, Change, and a New Sense of Self
Besides the journal, I'd also held onto two pairs of old glasses from Taiwan — a precious gift from my parents just before I moved abroad.
After years of wear the frames had gone crooked and the paint had flaked off the metal, and eventually I got a new pair here in the United States. So why had I never thrown the old ones out? Part of it was practical — a backup, just in case.
But part of it was what I described earlier: they stood for my deep bond with my parents. In a way, they also held the values and beliefs I'd carried over from Taiwan, along with that stumbling, unsteady period when I first landed in the U.S. Curiously, I've dreamed several times lately of my glasses breaking and having to be replaced — perhaps a gentle nudge from my unconscious.
Many of the ideas and habits I inherited from my family still nourish me in deep ways; others have started to hold me back. When I finally decided to say goodbye to those old glasses, what welled up was profound gratitude — thanking Taiwan and my parents for the "roots" that gave me the strength to travel far. And it was also a tender admission: I am no longer who I used to be. I've grown a different perspective, a different set of values, a whole new sense of who I am.
Between Two Cultures: What to Keep, What to Outgrow
As immigrants, we run into the clash of old culture and new again and again, caught in a fierce inner tug-of-war in all kinds of moments: Should I show up as who I used to be, or as who I am now?
In the world we came from, we learned to put our own needs last within the group, to grit our teeth and endure even when something felt wrong. In the new culture, we slowly grow into a different shape — one that can decline to bow to any authority or crowd, that can set down the weight of carrying everyone else's emotions, and that can instead say honestly what we feel.
I see this same dilemma in my clients and in myself all the time. In session, the question I most often invite people to sit with is this:
Within our home culture and our new one, what once supported us but now holds us back? And what did we once fail to understand, but now want to weave into our lives?
An Invitation: Opening the Cabinets Within
This inner sorting — deciding what to keep and what to release — is really no different from tidying the space around us.
Every so often, the act of cleaning gives us a way to check in on where we are. If we haven't tidied in a long time, our energy has surely been flowing somewhere else — so where has it gone? What grew or shifted there? And what have we been neglecting?
Where has the dust gathered? Where have unprocessed emotions and stresses piled up? What words have we swallowed and left unsaid? What have we longed to do and kept putting off? Which relationships have plainly changed while we refuse to admit they've soured? And what strength has quietly grown inside us that we've never let ourselves fully look at?
This is far more than a piece about organizing a home or clearing clutter. It is a sincere invitation.
I invite you to pause and look around your home. Is there a cabinet you haven't opened in far too long that's asking to be sorted through? Perhaps, once you open it, some of the practical knots in your life will begin to loosen on their own.
And I invite you to look in on the home inside you, too — to sit down and have an honest conversation with yourself. See whether there are colliding thoughts and feelings waiting to be made whole again.
Perhaps the change you've been longing for has already, quietly, begun.