Actually, it's more painful than that. It's like a serious emotional blow. A task quite impossible to complete unless it is under the most dire of circumstances. The task of which I am speaking is, of course, cleaning out my room.
I am in the process of moving back in with my parents. However, despite technically not living with them (although I still spent at least 40% of my day at their house), I still had a closet and bedroom full of crap. Well, not crap. But clothes, shoes, letters, to-do-lists, calendars, etc. I'm not really a pack rat. I just never got around to cleaning out my room after I moved back home after college. So, all the junk I brought back with me (although I mean junk in the most endearing way possible) from school, got added to all of the stuff already there. At the time, I was too caught up in the excitement of graduating that I never really committed myself to cleaning up my life.
Now, as I'm returning to live with my parents, I see how absolutely necessary it is to rid myself of excess. I have the ambition to do it, but the fact that I'm hopelessly sentimental makes this a very difficult process. I mean, I have probably all of the cards I have ever received in my life because they mean too much to me to throw away.
As I began to clean I found that I couldn't throw away an old calendar because it was filled with significant dates that I might want to remember, plus the pictures could be useful for something some day. I couldn't bear to part with a shirt that has strong memories associated with it. Some things I hated to see go just because I've had them for so long, although I hadn't needed them for several years. Plus, with everything I put in the "donation" pile or the garbage I couldn't help but wonder, "But what if I need this again one day?"
I made tremendous gains in creating more room in my life this weekend, but I was only able to accomplish it by temporarily turning into a cold-hearted, emotionless shell of a person. I guess during times like these, the only thing to do is not dwell on all the memories that were thrown into a black garbage bag like pieces of moldy bread, but rather, to acknowledge that they had fulfilled their purposes in my life...and move on. In a few years, they will have been replaced by new artifacts from my life that will inevitably suffer the same fate.
And so the cycle begins again.
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3 comments:
Well said. I struggle with the same thing. A thought that often helps me is that "you don't take a UHAUL with you to your grave." So, do you want to make your grieving children decide whether to keep or toss (and risk that they might be tempted to clutter up their own home with your crap because they too are very sentimental), or should you just do it yourself? That way, at the end we'll have held on to only the MOST precious items. Just remember, we always have the memories, and cluttering up our home isn't going to make us remember them any better, its just going to stress us out. That's what our hundreds of pictures are for anyway (which I know you would never dream of tossing)!
I remember the temptation to save every letter that was written to me while I was on my mission (which was a lot since I was wildly popular). I decided against it and shed my self of carting around an extra box when I moved around. People would give me a hard time about it and say, "don't you want to be able to read all of these letters that were written to you when you are really old?" I hope I have a much cooler life than that when I am old. Otherwise, the future looks depressing, with or without old letters.
Good job Mel.
makes me want to send you a card ;)
is that evil? :P
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