Yes, it’s true.  If your purse is a portable black hole where you carry the weight of the world, you are among the walking wounded.  Oh, you’ve got the style thing down. You may not understand why someone would get on a waiting list to buy a $10,000 Birkin bag.  You may balk at carrying a bag with someone else’s name or initials written on it in a repeating design.  You may have gone for the Target model that looked just like the tasseled, buckled, alligator number in Vogue but sold for roughly one/fortieth of the original’s price.  Or you played it safe with the good copy of the initialed bag that your wealthy girlfriend sports.  You bought a bag that had enough – but not too much – room for a neat collection of a few – but not too many — basics.  It had pockets for your stuff and you started out so well, sunglasses in the sunglass pocket and cell phone in the phone pocket. You had the best intentions.  But then you ran a bunch of errands, put so much in it you can’t zip it, bought bigger sunglasses, forgot to zip the makeup bag that came with that free gift, and allowed your reading glasses to become scratched and entangled in a mass of TicTacs, store coupons, deposit slips, receipts, and questionable tissues.  So it that the real you – a bargain bag with a bunch of rubbish floating around in the bottom?    If the answer is no, it’s time toface the truth – the key is maintenance. Like so many other things at midlife, you will curse if you don’t regularly police your purse.   Believe me, I’ve been there and I’ve cursed.
Maintain the hair, maintain the body, maintain the purse.  At a prearranged time that may range from every day to every time you get gas to every Sunday to every time you think of it, you have to go through your bag and intentionally decide, design, and dispose.  That time may be forced upon you when you fly to your sister’s for Thanksgiving, when the nail file and liquid foundation will be confiscated if you don’t get them out of there.
There are basically two philosophies of handbag organization – you can buy a bag that has many open compartments for designated items and then the debris you shouldn’t have put in there will fall to the bottom (but it won’t matter because it’s junk anyway).  Or you can buy clear zipper bags for groups of items that go together. (This is the way to go for purse-chameleons).  Wallet, calendar or PDA, pen, checkbook, and business cards can go in one container; small brush, makeup, and mirror in another; tiny wetting solution and lens case; and cell phone and glasses right where you can get at them.  You can even have a junk bag for the receipts, grocery lists, and coupons that didn’t make it somewhere else.  If you’re with kids all day, I’d lift and separate – my stuff in a stylish backpack or messenger bag, theirs’ in a tote you can fling in the back seat during precious private moments.

Of course, the real key is to carry as little as possible.  A very organized bag lady with one shoulder constantly weighed down is still a bag lady!