Sorting it Out...

Starting the sort before the move. Mostly that's been thinking about what I want to get rid of and working myself up to it. 

Which sounds really weird right? But...

I want to get rid of the china doll that was my mother's when she was growing up.
I want to get rid of the giant stuffed bear I've had since I was five.
I want to get rid of the stuffed lion that Brent bought me when we dating. 
I want to get rid of the stuffed animals we won at Circus Circus when I was pregnant and we couldn't drink in Vegas so we hung out and played games instead. 

They are all super sentimental items. 

But they are also all things that have spent if not the full 20 years we've lived in this house, close to it, on a shelf in a closet. Obviously when I see them I think about how special they are, but they aren't special enough to display. So...I will take some pictures of them and then send them away. 

I will send the doll to my sister. She will love to have it. She is the doll collector and honestly should have probably gotten it to start with but Mom gave her the baby doll and me the china doll. Fairness, doncha know. And at the time it did seem the fair way to do it. But Susan loves dolls and I don't. So fair wasn't really all that fair in actuality. It was unequal in enjoyment. 

But now she will get a chance to have her and enjoy her and hopefully she won't spend the next 20 years moving from display box to second couch to closet shelf. 

There are other things that need to go as well and it's so easy to think about getting rid of them but then when it comes down to the actual letting go it gets much harder. 

And Brent is an enabler. He's like, we aren't moving into a place that's smaller, just bring it all. 

But I don't want to bring it all. I want to clear things out that we are just holding on to for no real reason. 

I have throw pillows in the closet from color changes in decorating. Those need to go. I have decorative knick knack items that I need to decide which ones are coming with us. Now Tig has been doing his part to help there. We have never had such a chewy cat. We are pretty sure he must have been weaned way too early. But he has destroyed a few things (Tux has broken a couple of things too, don't want to let him totally off the hook) and he's left some crazy marks in others. Now I just have to decide if my "story" that my whales were attacked by sharks and that's why they have lines in their dorsal fins is a good enough one to keep them or if it's time to do a complete refresh. 

Which it's probably time for a refresh. 

Back in the days of the original Queer Eye I remember their interior decorator saying that the biggest mistake people make with decorating is that they get new things in new styles but don't get rid of the old so spaces get too crowded and lose the vision.

I feel that right now. 

I have my whales and dolphins that I've had for practically our whole marriage (some of them, it's taken years to grow the collection). I have my Disney figurines. I have squirrels that are from my childhood. We have some things that were my parent's things. We have some things that were Brent's parents things. We have a small collection of things that are Brent's. I will fully admit that most of the junk around here is mine. He gets to say if he likes or doesn't like things, but for the most part all of the knick knacky stuff is either things that appealed to me or things his parents bought us. 

I'm not a huge hoarder, as anyone who knows me knows. It actually makes me uncomfortable to have too much stuff. I used to come home from visits to New Mexico and do a massive clear out because my family leans toward hoarding. Not the full fledged stuff you see on TV shows, but every surface covered, boxes and boxes of stuff in the garage and every closet crammed full of things. I hated it when I was growing up. It makes me even more uncomfortable now. 

I've shared the story about when Brent and I were first married I didn't want ANY knick knacks or even pictures on the walls. I kept everything pretty pristine for the first couple of years. Now, to be really fair, it's not like we had extra money to spend on decorations but even if we did I wouldn't have. The apartment was so empty that when my sister visited she drew pictures on notepaper and taped them to my walls because she couldn't stand how blank everything was. 

But even with the fact that I feel uncomfortable and overwhelmed when I get too much stuff I still have a hard time getting rid of things at times.

Part of it is really weird. I tend to anthropomorphize things. Which I have learned is very common among my writer friends. It's probably why we are writers. We can imagine other people and their feelings and write stories about them. We started doing that with dolls and stuffies and dishes and blankets and... Well you see the problem right? If you are worried about hurting that book's feelings it's hard to part with it. 

The other part is that I feel like I should feel something about other things that I just don't. Like my mother gave me her wedding china years ago. At first I was excited because I remembered eating off of it for special occasions when I was a kid. But it turns out the china I remembered wasn't her wedding china, it was china she got years later. I had zero connection to the stuff she sent me. And it's got lead in the paint so we couldn't eat off of it even if we wanted. And yet...I haven't gotten rid of it. Because it feels like something I should be attached to.

What tends to happen is that I mention getting rid of something, or having something and people say, "Oh that must mean so much." or "What a lovely thing to have." and I'm sitting there thinking, well...okay. I guess I'm supposed to be attached to this thing. 

When we would get back from New Mexico and I would go on a spree getting rid of things we started doing an imposed time out. Brent would have me put the things in the garage and wait a month or so and then see if I still wanted to get rid of them. Because more than once I came home from a visit and just grabbed everything in site and got rid of it only to discover a few months later that I REALLY needed some of those things. So it became a slow get rid of. 

But since I have gotten rid of things and regretted it in the past Brent is wary when I want to get rid of things now. So we end up with me just keeping the things because he's afraid I don't really want to get rid of them, which he then thinks because I didn't actually get rid of them I must have wanted them instead of it just being not a big enough deal to me to insist that I didn't want them. 

So I have my own weirdness where inanimate objects have feelings along with the feeling that stuff SHOULD mean something to me and then the times where I've dumped stuff and regretted it and so I go into a weird spiral when it's time to get rid of things. 

It's a vicious cycle which ends up with me having too much stuff. 

But with the move we are (I am) taking the opportunity to get rid of the excess. To clear things out. To get a jump start on my Swedish death cleaning. 

And that starts with me preparing my head and my heart to do it. 

Because I mean it, I'm not moving all of those throw pillows!