Comments on: Reschooling Tool #19: Touch the Past and Let it Go

By: Keetha

Keetha — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:08:57 +0000

Do you know about Cringe?

By: janine

janine — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:48:19 +0000

Fantastic, I think I’ll need to reread this post in May when I head home for Selena’s wedding. I need to clean out my old bedroom, especially the AIM conversations from my 8th grade crush and my Sugar Ray posters. Sad.

By: Melia

Melia — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:12:43 +0000

Dana, I loved the idea of going through your old stuff with your partner, so she can understand what shaped you as a person. Then you can move forward together. It’s a constant process of collecting and divesting, and I’ve found that moving every few years has helped me get rid of the excess. Gill and I decided to do a bonfire at least every couple of years, too.

Brian, hope you don’t mind that Gill and I borrowed your fatigues and gear for our guerrilla decluttering. With 25-28 years of junk, we took some extreme measures in the wilds of Sonoma. I collect things for my journal like you do: postcards, stickers, and fortunes from Chinese restaurants. Just last fall, I got rid of a box of nearly every movie stub I’d ever gotten since 1993.

Julie, I’m constantly working on being a minimalist, too, and driving cross-country with a carload of stuff helps with that!

By: Julie

Julie — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:15:45 +0000

I used to be more of a packrat and then realized it is all just junk. Now, I try to be a minimalist - still a work in progress.

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:55:09 +0000

I’ve found that a good way to cut down on clutter is to have a your place destroyed by a natural disaster, and then flip your car. Deciding whether to keep something is much easier if it’s covered in mold. However, you might lose a few things you actually did want to hold onto. Not for everyone, I’ll admit.

I still collect things like crazy, though now a days it’s stuff I intend putting in my journal. My collecting of scraps, ticket stubs, business cards from cab driver in Bahrain, etc. is always more rapid than my input into said journal, which has lead to manilla envelopes being used as storage. I am now being overrun with manilla envelopes.

Following my siblings’ lead, I still have a ton of stuff at my parents house. I think Kim had wedding gifts in their basement for like three years after she got married so there isn’t much pressure. I suppose I could sift through it one of these days.

I really like the phrase “guerilla decluttering”. I picture you two dressed in the GI Joe party attire tromping through the jungle for a surprise attack on a clutter convoy on a moutain pass.

And Darren, consider yourself warned about wearing a backpack on one shoulder.

By: Dana Bennis

Dana Bennis — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:25:47 +0000

I went through a very similar process just a couple of weeks ago at my parents’ house. It’s been gradual - cleaning and removing of some old books and papers over the years. But that day a couple weeks ago was a big one. And going through it all with my partner Julie was real meaningful - revisiting my past with her, and being able to say goodbye to a lot of my old stuff and papers. But there’s still more to go through, and I keep getting new “things” and believing I have to save them. I wonder if that will always continue…

Thanks for the post.

By: Melia

Melia — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 05:34:35 +0000

I wouldn’t talk, Mr. I-read-the-Lost-blog-every-week.

Carrie, my next step is to sort through the letters I wrote to myself in high school. You know, the retreat activity where you’d get the letter in the mail a year later. I may just stick these in my journals and let them go when I’ve evolved to the next stage. That’s a good way of thinking about things — looking forward, and not backward. It really is liberating. It takes so much energy from the present to dwell on the past.

Lynnie, I know — I had a big “aha!” moment when Darren’s mom made the Catholic connection. I hear you on your new space getting as full as the old. Now that I’ll be driving a bunch of stuff out to Jackson, I think I’ll be facing the same thing. My books are going to be a challenge. It’s so hard to part with them, because I hold onto the hope of reading them one day!

By: Darren

Darren — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 03:54:32 +0000

One of your most meaningful items is a WordPress sticker? NERD!

By: carrie

carrie — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 03:53:51 +0000

Love this post Melia! So honest, and it struck a chord since I did the same thing with my high school love letters after I got married. I can declutter with the best of them, but I did feel some remorse after those sappy, emotional letters written to my more immature self were gone forever. But the act of getting rid of them continues to serve as a reminder to look forward, not backward, on my life.
My grandmother, on the other hand, kept EVERYTHING. She died this past year, and it fell to my mom to clear through all of her letters and memorabilia…boxes and boxes and boxes. Grandma should have culled her collection down a little bit more, so it was easier for us after she passed. But there were some true gems there that I now hold onto, like her college yearbook that contains a love letter to my grandfather. Priceless!

By: Melia

Melia — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:27:48 +0000

Kimberly, I told you I’ve changed! If you had told me in high school that I’d love parties, dances, and hip-hop — and live in Mississippi, of course — I would have thought you were crazytown. And while I still have the tendency to dramatize and romanticize, I’m much less tied to the idea of being unique, or “in this world but not of it,” as I used to say. (Rolling my eyes.)

Katie, I’ve done the same thing: brought heavy boxes of keepsakes with me wherever I move. Even though I’ve now purged myself of my letters and a lot of other keepsakes, I don’t know that I’ll ever part with my scrapbook-journals and photo albums. Even trashing my college and work notes will be a huge challenge, because in my mind they contain all the wisdom of the universe. Baby steps.

What I’ve done for the past few years is to paste the most meaningful items in my journal: postcards from the places I visit, or stickers that commemorate events (”I Voted” from the presidential election; a WordPress sticker from their community party in SF). I still save all my fortunes from cookies at Chinese restaurants. I don’t want to get rid of all evidence of my sentimentality, but I do want to make it a little more portable.