9 Things to Leave Behind Before the Year Ends

My mother used to clean out the linen closet in the fall. Not the whole house, and never in spring the way the expression promises. Just that one closet, sometime after the weather turned, and she would sit on the hallway floor with everything stacked around her and put back maybe two thirds of it. I asked her once why the closet. She said it was the only place in the house where she could see all at once how much she had been keeping without deciding to.

I think about that more than I expected to. Not because I have inherited the habit, which I have not, but because she had understood something about autumn that our culture keeps getting wrong. Fall is not the season for beginning. It is the season for looking at what has piled up since January and asking, item by item, whether you meant to be keeping it. The year is nearly closed. Nothing large is going to change in the time remaining. What can change is what you are still hauling.

Here are nine things I would put back in the closet, or rather not put back.

The thing you decided in January. Whatever you resolved that first week, you resolved it as a slightly different woman, in a different set of circumstances, before the year did whatever the year has done to you. She meant well. She was also working from information you no longer have. You are permitted to look at her decision the way you would look at a note in someone else's handwriting, with interest and without obligation.

The project sitting at eighty percent. You know the one. It has been eighty percent finished since roughly May, and it appears on lists, and it moves from list to list without moving forward. Here is what I have learned about these. They are almost never stalled for lack of time. They are stalled because finishing would require a conversation you are avoiding, or because you stopped wanting the thing and have not admitted it. Either name the conversation or admit the second one, because the current arrangement takes something from you every week and gives nothing back.

The standing meeting nobody wants. Somewhere on your calendar is a recurring hour that has outlived whatever created it. You attend because you have always attended. You suspect the others feel the same and no one has been willing to be the one who says it. Be the one. Sixteen weeks remain in the year, which is two working days of your life, and you have already privately concluded the hour is worthless.

The work you never agreed to do. Compare what fills your week against what you were actually hired for. Most women find something has grown in the gap. Committee work. Mentoring that has become one-directional. The organizing of things that need organizing and that always seem to need you. None of it appears in your review. All of it appears in your hours, and it renews itself in January unless you interrupt it now.

The apology you are still making. There is something you have been half-apologizing for since spring. A dropped ball, a decision that went sideways, a stretch when you were less available because your life required you somewhere else. Everyone involved absorbed it months ago. You are the sole remaining party administering the consequence, and every time you reference it you restore it to someone else's memory. Let it finish being over.

The friendship you are carrying by yourself. She has not initiated in a year. You have been explaining this to yourself, generously, with reference to her circumstances, and the explanation may well be true. It does not change the arithmetic of who is doing the reaching. You do not have to declare anything or end anything. You can simply stop being the one, and then observe what happens, which is information you have been carefully declining to gather.

The number you did not choose. Some figure runs in the background of your self-assessment. Revenue, title, followers, someone else's timeline. You did not sit down and select it. It arrived, and it has been measuring you since. Ask the one question that dispatches most of these immediately, which is whether reaching it would actually alter your life in a direction you want. Ask it honestly and watch how few survive.

The idea that January is when it happens. This is the one that costs the most. Women defer hard decisions from autumn to January because January feels like the appropriate container for change, and that feeling is entirely constructed. Nothing about the first week of the year makes a difficult thing easier. What the deferral produces is four more months of carrying something you have already decided to set down, so that you arrive at the decision in worse shape than you are in today.

The assumption that these months are yours. They are not, mostly, and planning as though they are is how autumn goes wrong. September through December is the most crowded stretch of other people's calendars in the entire year. School, holidays, family, fiscal year-end, travel, everyone's planning cycle at once. Look at the actual weeks. Subtract what has already been claimed by someone else. Plan against the small honest remainder rather than the imaginary open field, and you will end the year having done what you said instead of apologizing for what you did not.

None of the nine asks you to be better at anything. I notice that when I read the list back, and I think it is the reason I trust it. Improvement takes longer than four months. Setting things down takes an afternoon, and it is the only kind of change this part of the year can actually deliver.

My mother never came out of that closet with a plan. She came out with less. The sheets she kept were the ones she used, and the rest went to whatever place sheets go, and the closet closed easily for the first time since spring. She did not describe this as anything. She just did it every fall, and then went to make dinner.

That is roughly what I am proposing. Sit down with the year, take out everything you have been keeping without deciding to, and put back only what you use.