We’d worked with Pete for about six months when a few of us asked him to take us to his apartment.
Before that, Pete had revealed to us that he had a form of OCD and didn’t like being surrounded by too many things. His desk, perpetually devoid of anything but his computer, had already tipped us off.
We liked Pete a lot and were careful not to let our sincere fascination come off as teasing. He was happy sharing the details of his life with us.
Late one night, he’d decided he couldn’t stand to have his sofa in his apartment for another minute. He dragged it out the door, down the stairs, and to the complex’s dumpster. The sense of relief was immense, he told us.
It was that story that compelled us to invite ourselves over. His apartment was everything he’d said it was, and less.
He had one fork, one knife, and one spoon. One plate, one bowl, one glass. There was nothing in the living room but a TV. The bedroom had only a mattress on the floor, beside a small table with a lamp. No art or photos hung on the walls. It looked like a place where cops hole up while wiretapping the apartment across the alley.
As I took in the starkness of it all, I couldn’t help but feel a little envious.
Enough with the stuff
I have an aversion to knickknacks. My tchotchke tolerance is at rock-bottom. I don’t need a sign to remind me to either live, laugh, or love. And, I promise you, at my place it’s never wine o’clock.
I like to think of my aesthetic as space shuttle chic—I can’t have a lot of extraneous shit weighing me down or I might explode. Or at least feel like I will.
This becomes more true the older I get. I’ve gone through two major purges in the past decade, where I’ve paid people to come and fill up a truck with things that at one point I was convinced I’d need at some future point.
Yet there’s still more stuff. Always more stuff. So I’ve been trying to become ruthless.
The problem is, I’m also sentimental.
And those two sides are in a ferocious decluttering death match.
My sentimental side likes to hold onto things. Cards. Letters. School pictures. Souvenirs. That kind of stuff.
My ruthless side wants to take a match to all of it.
To be clear, I’m not talking about the Marie Kondo “spark joy” model. I get that. (What I don’t get is why she didn’t call her empire KondoMinimum. It was right there.) There are items that clearly need to go, and they do; turns out the “Most Improved” bowling trophy I kept from third grade wasn’t the panty-dropper you might think.
It’s the nostalgic items, the ones with personal meaning attached to them from connection to a loved one or a special moment in time, that cause endless internal negotiations.
In my desk drawer sits my great-grandfather’s ID card from when he worked for the railroad, in shifts that I understand often lasted all the livelong day. Now, a couple of things:
My great-grandfather passed before I was born, so technically, this belonged to a stranger.
The item was given to me by my mother, along with other stuff she was purging. That’s her grandfather, and she didn’t seem to have a problem letting go of it.
So why do I still have it?
As an aside, my mom also gave me a Gerber’s jar containing my baby teeth. It was horrifying. I can’t fathom why she kept them or, even worse, why she thought I’d want them. But that’s between her and the FBI now.
I didn’t have to bite the bullet to lose the teeth; that was an easy decision. But so many other things fall into the “I’ll deal with it later” category. That’s how my sentimental side appeases my ruthless side. It’s never “No.” It’s “Later.”
“You’ve been holding onto that “Taking Care of Business” keychain from Graceland for 15 years. Let’s get rid of it.”
“Not yet. Later.”
“These 18 Peanuts books from when you were a kid. They gotta go.”
“Good grief. They’re not hurting anyone. Later.”
“That misshapen mug your nephew made for you in art class 12 years ago. You’ve never used it.”
“I will. Later.”
Since this tug-of-war is ongoing, I thought it was important to dig into why I feel the need to keep things that I should toss.
No surprise: guilt—my constant, wet-blanket companion—is driving.
In the case of my great-grandfather’s card, throwing it away seems somehow disrespectful. I’m worried that someday I’ll meet him at the pearly gates and the first thing he’ll say to me is, “What, the card was taking up too much space?” And then I’ll point at my mom and say, “What about her? She got rid of it first.”
That’s not how I want my first day of death to go.
I’m tired of the mental gymnastics. I have enough things swirling around in my head. I don’t need actual things taking up space there too.
So, sorry, sentimentality, it’s time to let my ruthless side do what it does best: ruth.
I won’t be hauling my sofa off to a dumpster, but I can’t sit on a bunch of stuff that I don’t need and never take the time to appreciate.
My great-grandfather’s ID card is going in the trash. But first, I’ll take a picture of it.
That’s right, I’m moving these things to the cloud. I’ll take photos of every sentimental item I discard. Then, when I’m feeling nostalgic, there will be no drawers to root through, no boxes to dig into and—most importantly—no clutter polluting my peace of mind.
I’m not the first to use this system, but as anyone who’s been through this internal battle knows, getting to this stage is a major victory.
The purposeful purging starts now.
I just don’t know what I’m going to do when I run out of cloud storage.
Exactly this! A while back I realized I could photograph a lot of stuff and then take it to the thrift store so someone else could enjoy it. Of course, I haven't actually done it. And there's a good chance I never will. But it still seems like a great idea. Hopefully, you will have better luck.
My mom always gives me the cast offs of her decluttering too. They go straight to the garbage.