This quest to declutter has been quite liberating. Both literally and figuratively.
It has not only lightened the actual load the house is carrying, but it has lightened the load my brain has been carrying.
It all started when a friend gave me a copy of the life changing magic of tidying up.
While I thought the book was just going to help me get my house under control once and for all, it has done something else. It has helped me to discover a few important things about myself.
First, I’ve been spending lots of time fighting with my house. Fighting with it to find ways to make it store all the stuff I’ve accumulated.
And the truth of the matter is that I’ve surrounded myself with lots of stuff. With collections, with clothes, with mementos. With a whole bunch of crap that doesn’t make me happy.
It really only pisses me off because I have to spend so much time trying to find ways to corral it all.
The second thing I’ve learned about myself is that I have all these “collections.” Books. CDs. DVDs. Vases.
Most of these collections aren’t even that good. But I feel compelled to keep all the items that make them up because, well, they are a part of my collection and I can’t really just get rid of them, right?
But why not? What the hell is the point of a collection anyway?
Sure, it might be for personal enjoyment. I’m sure there are people who truly experience joy from whatever things they have in their collections.
But I have found that for me, these collections were about two things.
One, I am trying to impress people.
When people come over, they will really be impressed by the diversity of my CD collection!
In actuality, nobody ever looked at my CD collection except for me, and it was such a disaster that all it did was make me feel anxious and pissed off.
Then there is the second reason I had these collections.
Because I thought I should.
How can I get rid of that John Coltrane CD? That’s classic jazz! John Coltrane is a legend!
The truth of the matter is I really can’t stand jazz.
But I kept it that CD anyway because when people would check out my CD collection and see that I had John Coltrane and Madonna and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin and the Dixie Chicks and James Taylor and Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys and Daft Punk and Erykah Badu, and Taylor Swift, well, they would, um…
Wait…
In the twenty years that I have kept all these CDs, half of which I bought because they were the music of choice of whoever I was dating at the time and I felt the need to impress him, you know how many people have actually even laid eyes on my music collection?
Zero!
And I fucking hate John Coltrane, I can’t really stand Daft Punk and I like one Erykah Badu song.
Sort of.
What the hell am I keeping these things for?
I also have this collection of approximately 30 glass vases.
And they aren’t even nice ones. They’re not crystal or anything. They’re cheap, generic vases and most of them are probably from the grocery store.
You know how often I need a vase in my house?
Like twice a year.
Don’t get me wrong. I do love flowers. And I definitely have visions of (one day when the kids are older and out of full-on destruction mode) having fresh flowers that I’ve cut from my incredible gardens à la Martha Stewart in multiple locations throughout my house.
But even then, will I need thirty vases?
Yeah, um. NO.
Then there were the DVDs. Those were a little bit different.
Yes, there was the I-have-to-keep-those-because-they-are-Disney-movies-and-everyone-should-definitely-have-as-many-Disney-DVDs-as-possible mentality.
But then there was also the sentimental aspect.
The Baby Einstein and Sesame Street DVDs remind me of when the kids were little. So I really couldn’t get rid of those.
I’m not sure why not. We never watch them.
And most of them are so scratched up that they don’t work anymore anyway.
It was the same with the kids’ books.
Some were still around for sentimental reasons.
I read Pat the Bunny to Number 3 about 7,000 times. But no one has touched it in years. And half of the flap things were ripped out of it.
But then there were the books I was keeping because they were classics. And they were even mini collections within the book collection.
Like those little Beatrix Potter books. Definitely classics.
But I can’t stand reading them. In fact, I found myself hiding those books so when it was time to read a story the kids wouldn’t be able to choose any of them.
The kids never really understood what the hell was going on anyway. And there are only so many times I can say the word titmouse.
When I talked about going through the kids’ books and getting rid of most of them, Someone asked me about how I deal with the kids’ papers. How I handle all those sentimental things.
If you are strictly following Marie Kondo’s directions in the life changing magic, then you save the sentimental items for last. Because by the time you get to that stuff you are better at getting rid of things that really don’t make you happy.
But I really just throw most of that shit away the second it comes home from school. Or I use it for fire starters. Seriously.
Five years ago I saved a lot. Too much.
But it didn’t take long to realize that there are way too many papers coming home when there is just one kid in school. When you’ve got six who are in school, forget about it. It’s out of control.
I can’t keep all that paper.
It helped me when I thought about it this way:
I’ve got a couple things saved from when I was in elementary school. I have a state report I did when I was in fifth grade. A story I wrote in seventh grade.
That’s about it.
Every few years I might look at them. But to be honest, I think I’m ready to get rid of them.
Nobody else appreciates them. My kids wouldn’t be impressed by them at all.
And when I’ve been determining what to keep and what to get rid of as far as the kids are concerned, I think about how I would feel if my mom saved a whole bunch of those things.
I have like twenty pieces of paper with hand prints on them.
Sure, they are cute. But if my mom showed me an old piece of paper with my hand print on it, I don’t think I would really care all that much.
It wouldn’t remind me of anything.
We say we are saving these things for our kids when they are older. And maybe we are.
But I think most of this saving isn’t for them. It’s for us.
The sentimental stuff that I’ve saved is for myself.
Partly because of the nostalgia. The memories.
But a lot of it has to do with my refusal to accept the passage of time and the holding on to stuff from when the kids were younger because I’m having a hard time accepting that they are growing up.
So if there is something that is particularly funny, I will save it for the kids to look at and get a laugh out of when they are older.
Like this picture that Number 6 drew for me last year.
His caption for it was:
Mommy, this is me with a sad face because you put me in a time out.
And you need to cut my toenails.
:
I laughed so hard at that one.
So I’ll save a couple like that. I’ll take pictures of some so we have a record but don’t have the physical paper. And the rest go straight into the fireplace.
It’s time for me to embrace the kids getting older.
To be honest, I really like being able to enjoy doing things with them rather than having to do things for them.
And saving lots of old stuff keeps you from living in the present and appreciating the things about your children or yourself or your life in general right now.
I don’t need to keep a bunch of old Sesame Street DVDs or four copies of Goodnight Moon.
So after this realization clicked, and after I had gone through my clothes and then the kids’ books, I moved on to the DVDs and the CDs.
I have had this lame “collection” of DVDs for about ten years and CDs for about 20 years.
Here is the thing though. Since the birth of Netflix and iTunes, I pretty much never watch DVDs or listen to CDs.
But I’ve been holding on to them because they are part of a collection.
But who the hell cares?
Not me! Because most of the DVDs are scratched beyond recognition, and at least a quarter of the CD cases are broken.
We just don’t take good care of those things, because in reality, we don’t care much about them at all.
And so, they always look something like this:
So I went through every CD first. At first I had a hard time getting rid of them because most of them had one or two songs on them that I loved.
Rather than add one thing to my to do list, I took the time, and I imported all the songs from every CD that “sparked my joy” to iTunes. I kept a couple CDsfor the car.
And then I got rid of the rest. They went to Goodwill.
As for the DVDs, I got rid of almost every single one. We never watch them, and like I said, most of them were in terrible condition.
When I was done, I was left with this:
That’s it!
If we want to watch a movie, we’ve got Netflix. Or the library.
If I want to listen to music, I’ve got iTunes.
And now, I’ve cleared a little more of a path through the rubble of the past.
Time to move forward.
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