I’m disabled and had my closet professionally decluttered. Here’s what it taught me.

• My closet had been a mess for years and it was giving me anxiety.
• I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia 11 years ago, so some tasks can be harder to accomplish.
• I hired a professional organizer to help me deal with the clutter in my closet.

My closet has been in this state of disarray for years. It started off as a simple “owning too much stuff” mess and quickly turned into an overwhelming issue I was too anxious to tackle.

In 2022, a few months after I moved, I started seeing bugs everywhere in my room. They were all over my bed and my clothes. It was like a manifestation of my worst nightmares. I became paranoid. I put all the clothes and accessories in trash bags and shoved them into my closet. I told myself I was going to wash them and deal with them later once everything was resolved.

A few months after that, I found the bugs’ origins — some dried plants and herbs I had stored away in a wooden box — and once I got rid of that, they went away. But still, my anxiety and paranoia persisted. I barely opened my closet doors. Every time I did, I’d be overwhelmed with anxiety. I wanted to clean it. I really wanted to. But I couldn’t. Not only was there a mental barrier, but there was also a physical one.

I have fibromyalgia

I live on the third floor with no elevator — just like most buildings in NYC. For most people, that’s no big deal. But for me, it’s an entire ordeal. I have chronic pain, especially focused on my knees and ankles.

I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia when I was 16 years old; I’ve had this for 11 years now. Some weeks are better than others. I vary from being able to leave the apartment four times a week to not leaving my apartment at all. Most of the time, I exist in the middle, only going outside once or twice a week.

I knew I couldn’t declutter my closet by myself. I wouldn’t be able to go up and down my stairs countless times to throw out the dozen trash bags. I needed help.

I hired someone to help me

That’s where a professional organizer comes in.

Millie Naor, professional organizer and founder of Bella Organizers, came to my apartment one Monday morning. With an estimate of four hours of work, I was ready to get started and get it over with at the same time.

We started by emptying the entire closet, creating categorized piles on my bed and floor. This section was for jeans, this other for shirts, this one for dresses, and so on. Of course, all the trash bags went to the hallway to be taken out at the end.

Once the closet was empty, it was time to decide what to keep and what to throw away. This, she told me, was the part people had the most difficult time with. And while I struggle with the physical act of throwing away stuff (because the trash is down three flights of stairs), deciding when I’m over a piece of clothing has never been difficult. In fact, if I could, I’d reinvent my closet every season.

Looking at all the piles around me, I felt incredibly overwhelmed and lost in the sea of stuff. This was the part where I’d probably give up if I were doing it by myself.

We put away the sections, as Millie gave me some organizing tips — while also letting me know there are no hard rules and I can change things up and make my own systems later if these didn’t work for me. It ended up being two hours of work instead of four since we decided to throw out all the things I didn’t want anymore instead of sorting them into donation bags and trash bags.

If I had done it all by myself, decluttering that closet would have taken me days. If I had done it with a friend or two, it would have taken us a whole day. It took two hours with a professional organizer. If you have the funds, I highly recommend hiring a professional.

I wish I had done it sooner, years ago, when the problem first started.