Over the weekend I asked a good friend of mine if I could rifle through her discarded clothing.

A dignified and reasonable woman, she declined this request with a certain air of grace, even though I wasn’t deterred by her assurances that her refuse consisted mostly of Supre clothes and misguided priorities. This was not an easy task considering I still wear Supre to work and have a particular passion for unscrupulously picking apart the cringe-worthy aspects of people’s pasts – I may be so self obsessed that I can’t remember whether a friend has siblings, but I’ll never forget those frosted tips in a pixelated photo from 2004.

There’s something that is so mesmerising about tipping out the unwanted contents of one’s life and sorting them into piles on the floor. Because while you may still be so poor that you’re willing to overlook a bolognaise stain on a mediocre work shirt, the real gold is analysing what people no long deem worthy of being in their possessions. Most of these things are stuffed into black garbage bags, with the thin plastic denoting the trashy categories their former owner has classed them into and hiding the shame of singlet tops claiming the wearer is the spouse of Ashton Kutcher. The great bottom drawer and top cupboard purges are usually done in secret and with a liberal dose of disgust. People declare such items as too shameful to attempt to give away or admit ownership of and pack them out of sight. The trip to the Vinnies bin is done with the stealth of an Australian kayaker sent to blow up Japanese submarines in the night (now that was one tense bloody documentary) – it’s a well-planned military operation which can have dire consequences if discovered. That’s what makes the thought of a bulging garbage bag so intoxicating – there’s nothing more revealing about a person than the stuff they want to quietly rid themselves of.

As someone who came from a big family of cheapskates and borderline hoarders (my sister still has a candy bracelet from when her and her husband got together about seven years ago), the plastic sack of unwanted – but not wholly soiled – goods was a treat for my sisters and I. Being a family of four children in this day and age, we looked like a tribe of 13 being brought up in the Potato Famine to smaller families, which wasn’t helped my mother’s walking stick and my father being exactly what you would envisage after hearing the words “Aussie”, “battler” and “leprechaun” together. As such, we were often privy to abandoned aspects of teenage lives by rummaging through their tatty remnants of their younger selves. People vaguely related to us with growing daughters presented the opportunity for clothing upgrades, and musty piles of overworn, no longer cool fabric excited us more than a live television broadcast of a Hanson concert.

We would tear at the plastic with the intensity of a pack of hyenas ripping at the flailing body of a wildebeest, squealing relentlessly as its internal organs are pulled from its skeleton and sliced open in the dirt. Hesitation be your downfall: all that stood between your ownership of a maroon turtleneck was that split second in which another set of hands managed to snatch it from your clutches. It was a strictly first in, average dressed. The only exception to the rule was a t-shirt with the words “yeah right” emblazoned on the fabric in glitter. Mum told my sister it should be mine because I was sarcastic and the shimmering sentiment suited me. However, looking back, I can’t help but wonder if I was bequeathed that top because it was the only thing in the bag that fit my plump body and no one wanted me trying other things on and stretching them out.

Needless to say, the prospect of having new(ish) things was exhilarating. But after a while our attention turned to the items that were so uncool even the Maguire girls wouldn’t touch them. We couldn’t help but wonder how such things came to be in the custody of our funky older idols in the first place. At some point it clicked: new things are great, but the humiliating relics of someone’s past are much more valuable. And these kind offerings were really sacks of shame, detailed inventories of indignity.

There’s a reason spies go through rubbish bins in cartoons: there are all kinds of truths in the items we try to dispose of. And an old shirt or knick knack can be just as telling about a person as several binned boxes of choc-backed Tiny Teddies. You could assume, for instance, that the bear-shaped biscuits indicate poor eating habits, a tendency towards child-like items and the sheer number of them would suggest shocking self-control. These three assumptions could lead to bigger conclusions about the person such as them being of ill health, daddy issues and an addictive personality. Of course, the multiple boxes could simply be in the trash because the person had been using them to store hand-woven bracelets and just experienced a popularity rush, selling all the handicrafts in a short space of time. The point being that you can’t really say for sure what that artefact means, but you can certainly have some fun trying to solve the riddle.

A bag of discarded items is the perfect fodder for judgemental over thinking, which just happens to be my favourite pastime. That collection of polo shirts that are exactly the same but different shades of pastel? You’re a boring  Saddle Club fan who would make a terrible wedding guest. Skate shoes with curse word laden personal jokes written in texta on the sides? You were a typical Year 9 floozy who exclusively wears Havianas with diamantes embedded on the straps and says things like “I don’t care, I’ll let my kids listen to Chris Brown – he shouldn’t be punished for getting angry and lashing out that one time”. And your three quarter demin jeans tell me that you’re not to be trusted and that some people should be sterilised for the good of humanity. Yes, the magic of pilfering the contents of one’s past life like a possum in a wheelie bin is interpreting the garbage left behind. The secrets you uncover could be dark, embarrassing or downright boring, but it’s up to the filthy succourer to draw the conclusion.

So perhaps it’s a good thing my glorious friend so swiftly shutdown any suggestion I ransack her possessions, because I can have sinister, friendship-ruining imagination at times – and this young woman hopes to start her own dessert café in Paris during her mid-life crisis and I will absolutely want to sponge off her.