Letting Yourself Go: Decluttering Tips for 2026

to the twenty-fifth edition of Tiny True Stories! I’m so glad you’re here. This is a monthly newsletter where I share supershort true stories you can read in 5 minutes or less and little letters of recommendation. If you want to get right to that story, scroll on down past the picture!

Happy new year, everyone! We traveled in early December to see my sister and niece again and then stayed home for Christmas and honestly it’s been really nice. I know people go nuts with their kids home for so long (and please know I too am going nuts), but not having to get up and go anywhere unless we want to is dreamy. (And please know even writing this makes me feel a little gross, knowing there are firefighters and doctors and line cooks who don’t get that luxury at all.)

I keep having this thing, and you can see it happening in the paragraph I just wrote, of extreme self-consciousness while I write. It’s not saying, “This is terrible; everyone will hate it” or anything, just an enormous cloud of self-awareness. I constantly feel imaginary commenters in my brain and worry that I will come off in a way I don’t intend. Of course everyone and all writers feel this way to some extent (see! I just did it again! I imagined a commenter saying “BUT WHAT ABOUT”), but mine feels bigger than it should. This happens to me in person sometimes—I have a low, somewhat deadpan voice, and sometimes people think I’m being sarcastic when I’m not, and I always hate being misunderstood. I think social media has maybe broken my brain this way. I’m not big on new year’s resolutions but I think taking time off, more deliberately, from these billionaires’ scroll machines is probably a good goal.

With that in mind, onto the story, which is another kind of decluttering.

(Remember too that I read every Tiny True Story aloud to you as a voiceover! I often include little mini-stories and tidbits that don’t appear anywhere else in the newsletter. Plus you can peep my voice and see whether I’m being sarcastic or not.)

Letting Yourself Go: Decluttering Tips for 2026

I swore I’d never be one of those mothers who lets herself go. The mother I feared was an imaginary ogre in my mind: hair dirty and unkempt, body large and soft, clothes stained and ill-fitting, eyes like a skeleton. I never made this promise out loud because I know everything that’s wrong with it. I can barely write it now. It’s embarrassing, this old want to still be beautiful. It’s embarrassing to be so inflexible in how I see my own beauty. God it’s so embarrassing, to be so focused on something that matters as little as the shapes your body makes in the mirror.

And my son often wakes before five, and being pregnant three times has changed my hair texture so much that none of my old tricks work anymore and I don’t want to waste my precious free time figuring it out, and I leave the house in a stained shirt because my daughter wiped her raspberry fingers on me just as we needed to leave and the clean shirts are in the dryer, clean but never put away, and who cares, my arms and thighs and butt muscled large from carrying a thirty-pound baby up and down the stairs all day long, my stomach softer and bigger than ever, none of my clothes fitting right and I don’t want to bother buying new ones when my body seems different every single day, and all of a sudden, that imaginary ogre surprises me in the mirror.

I’m supervising my daughter brushing her teeth when I catch sight of my own reflection. Check, check, check, check. All of it. Like my own Bloody Mary, I invoked her name one too many times. I am so tempted to write here about my diet and exercise and surgery and mental health, or my stupid skincare, or any number of things to show you that I did not do this on purpose. We should let this go, let that go, let it all go, except for this one thing—hold on forever, tight, to the ideal physical self, an anchor dragging us down in a life of rough seas. But I can’t spend too long thinking about it because I see my daughter’s two spent toothbrushes still sitting in the holder. They look like they’ve been run over by a car, and she has at least two pretty new ones that she likes. There isn’t room for the new ones because the old ones sit there and sit there. I suggest it might be time to throw them away. Her little blue eyes fill with tears and she sobs with genuine sadness. “No! Not yet, mommy!”

The metaphor is right there, isn’t it? It would be such a neat and tidy story: tell my daughter to throw away these things that don’t serve her anymore, even if they felt important once. Tell myself the same thing.

Instead I let her keep the toothbrushes. She dries her tears and tells me she will try again tomorrow. She promises. It’s the third or fourth time she’s told me this, and she is certain it’s true every time. She’s right. Letting things go isn’t as simple as tossing them away. Even if she doesn’t even use the old toothbrushes anymore. Even if she knows the new ones are better. I tell her I understand. We will try again tomorrow. We both mean it.

(Please know that I am not fishing for compliments! You are very kind, and also you do not need to tell me I look great, or give me ideas for supplements to take. This is, respectfully, not about that.)

1. I decorated Christmas cookies with my daughter, but in order to do it, I had to squeeze it in while my son was napping. I could make a sugar cookie and homemade frosting, or I could do what I did and buy pre-made Pillsbury dough and canned frosting. My daughter LOVED it and we were able to do the entire process, from rolling out the cookies, baking, dyeing the frosting, and decorating (and eating, obviously) before my son woke up. It was GREAT. As Ina Garten would say, storebought is fine.

2. This poem by Gayle Brandeis:

   

   If you read this far, hello, I love you! And I am considering writing more TTS, maybe twice a month instead of once. Writing it here to plant it in my brain. Hopefully we won’t have a king by that time.

   Until next time,
   Jill