Being selective about things

Rook asked me if I wanted to do anything fun today and I looked at him blankly. "Fun? Fun. Hmmmm. No."

What I want is to keep getting rid of stuff. I feel weighed down by junk. I'm a little impatient with myself for accumulating so much crap.

Also, I feel old in a particular way. Old and jaded. There are particular kinds of crap that I remember liking to have. I'd buy these things in garage sales or thrift stores or pick them up free off the street. Things like... oh stuffed animals and weird jewelry and tiny cute boxes and tchatkas of that sort, and scarves, and bits of lace, and pieces of computer equipment that might come in handy someday or else get made into a craft project or be fun to take apart and figure out... figurines of lizards, and unusual decks of cards, and empty boxes that might be good to put things in or make something out of, useful-seeming bags and backpacks and purses and shoulder-holster travel document holders that make me think of bandoliers and tricorders... bits of lingerie that can be combined with other things to make silly new-wavey-punky outfits or be worn to bed to be torn off of one's body and then thrown away... little notebooks... big notebooks... office supplies and index cards... odd bits of clothing that I thought I might save for children to play dressup with if I ended up having that sort of children or hosting them as guests.

NO...

I don't really like most of those things any more and if I continue to accumulate them it's like trying to travel back in time and give my younger self a present. But me-now doesn't give a flying fuck.

I have too much of that stuff, years and years of it, and could get rid of nearly all of it.

What if I did, and kept just two... or one... of each of those sorts of things?

What about going through the shelves of old journals, and tearing out pages that are or are not interesting and throwing the rest away?

The junk I have a weakness for still are: snarky tshirts, books, ephemera like flyers and posters, stickers, notebooks. If you count books as junk which surely you don't.

Once my sister had me rip the snarky fronts out of tshirts that I never wore anymore & save them or use them for patches (to sew on or pin onto backpack or jackets). That worked. I regretted a couple of them later.

It's painful to toss some of these things because they are memories.

Comments

[minnie]

are any of the old playing cards any good/? if so, save them for me.

[fridawrites]

Cleaning out like that can be difficult for me to do when I'm attached to certain kinds of things, but it helps me think better/makes me feel that I have more mental energy (even when I've used all my energy cleaning), and it's good feng shui. Do you have a friend who is a "thrower-awayer" who can come help? She (or he) would be less emotionally attached to it, but could see what you should still hold onto because you'd be likely to use it or because it would have more meaning/personal value.

One suggestion a friend gave me: choose one or two objects representative of a collection, a vacation, a particular time in life rather than getting rid of all of a collection. Then those most cherished items can hold those memories.