Oh The Places You’ll Go (and the Stuff You’ll Lug Around)

I’ve always been a keeper of things, sentimental and guilt-prone. Here’s a brief tour of how it’s manifested itself:

Kid years:

Each summer, my mom would pile us four kids in the family car—for much of my childhood that car was a station wagon with the best seats ever: rear-facing—and head toward her hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She would pack food and camping gear enough for the 3-5 days we might take to make the 16-hour drive, exploring Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota along the way. 

My sister and I were marveling recently at her pluck to do so. She would set up a campsite by herself with, I’m sure, nominal help from us, cook breakfasts and dinners over a camp stove, plan out the day’s adventures, then load the car inside and out—using a tarp, naturally, to cover camping gear on top of the car because this was in the 80s and early 90s—and repeat the next night. 

On these vacations we were often at visitor’s centers, KOA’s, and tourist attractions which are otherwise known as meccas for treasures like free brochures and pamphlets. Because we didn’t have a lot of money for souvenirs, we kids collected these printed materials as trip keepsakes. And I kept all of them. I kid you not. The commercial ones advertising expensive tours and things we hadn’t done? Stored carefully by me.

Fast forward to my twenties:

I still kept pretty much all handouts from school and church. I still kept every card including polite thank you’s and cards with just signatures. Shoot, I think I even kept the birthday cards that State Farm sends to their customers. Not joking! I still collected ticket stubs and event programs, and every notebook that had any sort of class notes in it.

I developed a love of thrift shopping and bought too many clothes—new and used—that I didn’t even really like enough to have afforded and which ended up in boxes under my various cinderblock-raised beds. College living and even some cheap post-college living is fun. I had a hard time passing up books I wanted to someday read or get rid of books in that same category, and amassed pounds and pounds of books. When I’d return to my Montana home for school vacations or summers, I would often stay up way too late poring over childhood and high school memorabilia, glad I’d kept it.

Then sometime in my early thirties:

My mom let me know she was doing some organizing projects, and was going to send me several boxes of keepsakes and memorabilia. That was a significant day—I was officially being kicked out of the nest and was now the adult responsible for toting around six large and heavy cardboard boxes with paraphernalia from my past. I pared it down a bit, but then stashed the rest of it in the storage (aka “Black Hole”) area of my apartment. Convenient, right?

When I took off on what turned out to be my first Grand Tour of the (Western) States, I had to decide what to do with such things. Dumb decision: A lot of them came with me, crammed in my CRV, whilst a box or two stayed in the storage closet I rented for my household items. Guess how handy it was to have notes from 9th-grade geometry with me while I traveled and worked in multiple states? Or a 1990 brochure from a mine in Deadwood, South Dakota? Or the cutesy or functional quotes that Sunday School teachers gave me in 1995, never dreaming I’d hold onto it for decades, much less pack it around the western United States on a grand adventure? 

Five moves later I approached these boxes and a lot of my other previously important stuff with merciless vengeance. The keepsakes and possessions had very literally been items to be lugged around, and I’d done very little (correction: no) interacting with them in that year. It seemed to take reaching a point of “enough is enough” to be able to go thru these and purge mercilessly. I still have plenty of “stuff” in my life and have sentimental notes and objects, I just have much fewer of them. And the practicality of getting rid of the ones that were either donated, recycled or thrown away somehow alleviated the guilt and sentimentality that motivated me to pack them up and pack them around for so long.

So, what are you hanging on to out of guilt or sentimentality that has long since served its purpose? I double-dog dare you to have a weekend of having the best kind of good-bye party and give yourself permission to get rid of even (gasp!) potentially useful items. You might want to fortify yourself by reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. While I don’t abide by all her suggestions it’s good stuff and can only help you on your way to loving living with less stuff.

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