I have a terrible habit of taking hand-me-downs. Whether they be clothes, (unopened/never been used) beauty products, books or accessories. I love taking pieces off people, especially when you know I’ll get some use out of it.
But with all possessions, they do get old, you do tire of them and eventually you’re trying to get them off your own hands but you just can’t part yourself with it.
This practice then leads to hoarding and over cluttering, which I am very guilty of.
My thought process is this… people have paid good money for something and for whatever reason they’re over it and don’t want it anymore. Why throw it out? Especially if there’s nothing wrong with it.
But when I take ownership over something and it doesn’t really work out, it literally pains me to get rid of it. Again, my mind is telling me, “Someone has worked hard for that… and you’re just going to throw it out?”
A few months ago my mother gave me a cream cleanser she thought would be good for me. It ticked all the boxed. Cruelty-free, check. Organic, check. Australian made and owned, check. But when I gave it go, there was an ingredient in it that made my skin break out. I could never use it again. But for months that followed I held onto it because it was something my mother had bought for me in good faith that I would use it.
When you get to a certain age where you earn your own money, you feel that it’s extremely unnecessary for your parents to buy things for you. I believe the same thing goes with parents; at a certain age they don’t take any value in things you’ve spent money on for them. They would rather you keep your money and the only “spending” you do on them is your time. (Maybe that doesn’t go for everyone, but I know my parents would rather me spend a few hours a week with them rather than my money.) So, when my mother bought me this cleanser I was not only grateful but guilty that she did.
A friend once handed me down a loose powder which she had bought online that was too dark for her. Knowing that my skintone darker, she gave it to me but for whatever reason it didn’t work for me either and I simply never used it. But again, I held onto it because she had spent her money her hard earned money on it and I would feel absolutely awful throwing it out. I did eventually and for months that followed, I feared she’d ask me how the product worked for me and I’d tell her that I threw it out.
Several months later I eventually brought it up with her and confessed that I had thrown it out. Her response was, “What loose powder? …I forgot all about it.”
This mindset stems from the time when my father gave me a David Jones voucher worth a very large sum of money. He had received it from his work for his 20th year anniversary of service and without a second thought he gave it to me.
I couldn’t believe that my father worked for two decades and when receiving such a generous gift simply handed it over to me. While he could have easily spent it on a nice suit for the office, or a couple of nice shirts, ties or casual wear… nope, he decided it was better off in my hands.
When I was given such a gift I made sure that I wasn’t going to spend it on something I didn’t need. Although dad has said to me, “You can use that for your makeup stuff.” I decided that I was going to spend it on something worth while and show him that his twenty years of working didn’t go in vain.
Not only did this prove to me that my dad is the coolest and the most generous dude on earth, I promised that I was going to see the value in everything, especially if it was something I didn’t earn myself.
