3:00 snapshot #763

[urbpan]

Can you believe that we aren't totally out of our old place yet? Last night we dragged out a bunch of furniture to the sidewalk for today's yard sale (the whole street has a big yard sale once a year). I can't fully express how painful the experience of moving is for me. Here we are months later, and I still go into this place every couple of weeks and shuffle boxes around, find papers and objects that are heavy with sentiment and meaning, maybe throw out a bag of stuff, and leave feeling sad and depressed. It's a mental illness I'm sure, to be so attached to material things, but without them how would we know that we lived a life? How can I remember that people love me without notes written on paper? How can I prove what I was doing ten, fifteen, twenty years ago--that I was expressive and engaged, that my personality is what I pretend it is? Part of me wants to dispose of it all without even looking at it, to be purely who I am now and prove to myself that I'm worthwhile without piles of dusty papers and once beloved trinkets. But part of me wants to preserve it all as a museum of who I was, and the time and place where I lived, in case that ever becomes important.

Comments

[roaming.livejournal.com]

Humans make meaning. It's liberating to decide how much and what kind of meaning to ascribe to anything. I feel the way you do about stuff. And I spend waaaaay too much time organizing and shuffling and unshuffling and thinking about my stuff. It's beginning to bug me, the way my stuff runs me. Who's in charge here, anyway?!?!?!

So yeh, I get it. I'm inching toward the hose and dumpster method. Because I have boxes of saved papers and I know for sure if they disappeared overnight I wouldn't have a single clue what was in them that I'd 'lost."