Decluttering my life

This weekend my husband and I moved out of our "starter home" in the suburbs and into a farm house we will be renting from very good friends for a while before we buy it. (Side note: please pray our old house sells quickly.)

I am already a creature of habit and do not like change, so the move was difficult in that regard. I get way too attached--to people, to places, to things, to routines. I haven't moved a lot in my life, and those few times have been serious emotional turmoil (yes, I'm being over dramatic, but that's what it's felt like each time). Little did I realize how my tendency to attach would make this transition even more difficult.

I am a packrat. Third generation born and raised. There is nothing cute about it, I'm now realizing--hopefully not too late to fix it. I grew up staying a lot with my dear wonderful Granny whom I love so very much, and she was part of the generation that lived through the depression and learned to hang onto things for meager times. They had a good excuse. I learned to find comfort in clutter, I think, partly because she had so many little odds and ends and trinkets that she would keep, either for sentimental value or for a rainy day or simply because they'd always been there and had become part of the scenery. And I was comfortable and at home in her house, thus in that environment.

My mom wasn't nearly as intense, but I still remember her occasionally calling herself a packrat; I think her reasons for hanging onto things were more out of sensible frugality than anything else. If it could be fixed, altered, repurposed, or given away to someone who could use it, that was being a better steward of things than just throwing it away. That makes sense.

Then comes me.

I don't know when it started. I've always been comfortable in clutter, and it truly has never consciously bothered me. I have joked about my "organized clutter" numerous times and laughed off the fact that, yes, there are twelve piles of paper on this table, but I can tell you exactly where everything is within those piles! I was one of those kids who had to be constantly ridden and nagged to clean up my room. It wasn't necessarily dirty, just unorganized and full of... just stuff. I collected various things over the years--dolls, figurines, jewelry, Beanie Babies, bottles of a few kinds, shells, nail polish, CDs, t-shirts, books--and those things compile and take up space and collect dust, and the dusty piles become things you just block out and want to forget about. So you forget them and leave them in their dark corners, only to move on to some new collection that will inevitably take up space in some opposite corner, thus repeating the cycle. Then before you know it, you're moving boxes of your clutter to new phases of your life for no good reason other than that they've always been there and you're attached and it feels like an amputation of part of yourself to get rid of them.

(takes a breath.) You know, just generally speaking.

I moved my stuff, my clutter--years of it--to college with me, then into our first apartment when we got married, then into our first house, and much of it followed me to this new house. And guess what.

It. Is. Exhausting.

I'm just now beginning to have my eyes opened to the fact that stuff weighs people down. It seems a lot of people have been enlightened to this fact already and I'm one of the last to catch on. And I'm sure people have tried telling me this before, and I didn't listen, because I'm a Taurus and I'm stubborn.

I started throwing some things out before we moved, so there would be less to move and because I was starting to get clued in to the idea tht I really didn't need all this stuff. For me, being the emotionally attached person I am, it was a big deal to throw away every student/camper drawing I've vet been given, or every piece of clothing associated with a memory. And having picked up on my mom's frugal tendencies (and taken them to the extreme), I didn't want to toss anything I'd gotten free or at a good deal. But I started to. I felt like I was making progress.

Since we got everything moved, I've made more baby steps (which to me feel like leaps) toward a simpler, less cluttered life. Today I purged a scrapbook-stuff box of all the cards we received at our wedding. Yes, I was still holding onto them. No, I'm not entirely sure why. I wanted to scrapbook them, and each of them had some emotional value, but I realized how ridiculous it was to keep hanging onto things that don't matter in the long run.

Here's to small victories as I clear out my life of junk and make room for the new life that will soon be a large part of mine. No, it's not easy to let go, but it's necessary and healthy. I'm learning. I'm progressing. I'm getting there.