Storage

A good friend recently called me to share that her parents asked her to clean out her childhood home. For some, like myself, this is a joy of an activity. I love an archive. I love getting lost in old papers, turning over each piece to read every dusty word. I love to organize; it’s medicine for my anxiety. But more than anything, I love to throw things out. Erasure makes me feel free.

This friend felt different. She confessed that to go back through the stuff that belonged to her younger self was misery. The attic stored bad memories and lonely memories, many which still weighed heavily on her all these decades later. But her parents’ request was a mandate: all the sibling’s belongings must be collected into one box each.

So the next time she visited her childhood home, she sifted. With a glass of wine in hand, she did what she was told and tried to ignore the playful banter of her brother and sisters who enjoyed the task. My friend moved quickly, barely skimming found pages to keep from scalding her nervous system. “I disassociated,” she told me about finding her teenage diaries. “It was awful to reopen them, but I just couldn’t throw them out.”

“Why not?” I probed.

“I don’t know,” she replied earnestly. “It feels wrong to throw out a journal. What if I want to remember the pain again and remind myself it was all real? It was good to confirm that I’m not making fiction out of my past.”

“I get that,” I replied. “I really, really do.” But I still suggested she say goodbye.

Our memories are both hero and villain in our lives. They are malleable and fallible, but also demanding, arrogant and stuck in their ways. Memories haunt us and they can’t hide from us. And in this age of remembrance where every moment is destined to be documented, we are inescapable to ourselves. We freeze our time before we’ve even had the chance to experience it.

Like my friend, I’ve been in a confrontation with my own stuff. For me it’s not the physical journals even though many of them make me cringe. It’s not that I have too many clothes or shoes or that I’m overwhelmed by throw pillows or books—it’s the digital stuff. It’s the hard drives filled with terabytes of photographs that weigh me down. I feel stressed just thinking about what I’m storing. There are too many pictures of stranger’s faces, friendships long-gone, and broken-up-with boyfriends. The selfies, brunches, cocktails and long nights are outdated. There are too many screen shots of text messages that hurt my feelings to find. And then there are the pictures I do love, the precious and printable ones, but they are surrounded by an onslaught of outtakes.

Sometimes I just want to delete it all in one click. Just drag and drop to the trash and format the hard drives. I fantasize about being free from all of this memory.

But I can’t. I don’t. And I won’t because I‘m addicted to taking stock of it all. So instead I’ve spent years sorting file-by-file and memory-by-memory in an effort to say goodbye. On some days I’m ruthless and delete with abandon and on other days I’m precious. I’ll sit with a journal next to me, writing my thoughts about erasure and in turn make a physical artifact out of the digital files. I’ve found a hobby in letting things go.

So I suggested my friend do the same. I gave the type of harsh advice that you only give to someone you love: “Throw them out,” I said with certainty. “Rewrite the story. Don’t replace it, but update it. Overwrite it. That’s how our memories work anyways. Tell the story again and place it in the context of the now. Do something witchy and ritualistic with them. Honor them. Put some spell on them. Then throw them the fuck out.”

We went back and forth about whether this was possible for her and then as friends do, we changed the topic to something else. I can’t recall what.

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A Prompt For You

This piece was living in my computer as a bunch of fragmented thoughts until I came across a Mary Oliver poem titled Storage. It inspired me to flesh them out and share here. If you are in the journaling spirit: Write about an item in your home that you have a hard time getting rid of, but think you’d feel freer without. Share in the comments if you feel comfortable.

Mary Oliver’s Storage, found in her collection titled Devotions