Placeholder draft — replace with the real essay.
Every couple of years I go through the flat with a bag and a rule — if I haven’t touched it in a year, it goes — and every couple of years I stop about two-thirds of the way through, usually at the box of cables.
The part that actually works
Clothes are easy. Books are hard, but I’ve made my peace with keeping them. Cables are where the whole project quietly dies, every single time, because each one might be the one thing I need in six months.
Maybe the honest version of this essay is that the ritual itself is the point — the twice-a-year audit, not the empty shelf at the end of it. I keep not finishing. I keep starting anyway.