I tend to keep everything. I just moved and realize that I have so much useless crap. I keep things for the sake of holding on to the value that it has to me personally.
top 5 useless things I found in my room:
1) A red dread-lock in a zip lock bag. That's right. My friend Josh, about two years ago used to have dreads. He cut them. I kept one. I still have it. :0 Which excites me cause now I can..... oh right do nothing with it.
2) A wig. I have a black wig that used to belong to my cousins. I stole it. This is for all of the movies and plays that I will be doing this year. I will make sure and write everything around this black wig.
3) Chocolate. I don't know why I have some random chocolate bars that I never ate. It's like I kept them there and planned on eating them later or something. Who puts off chocolate?
4) Birthday cards. They are honestly so hard to throw away. "But this one has mickey mouse on it." I say to myself. This one is the annual funny card that my uncle Robert sends to me, I have to keep a record of this so that when I grow old I can make a museum of funny uncle Robert-like birthday cards. Every time I go through the birthday cards I open the envelopes to make sure that I didn't miss any cash that my family may have sent me.
5) A Dead Rose. I got the rose when my new grandma Vivian came to hear me sing in DECEMBER. It is JULY now. I kept it because I may have wanted to create an animation about decaying and dying flowers. Thanks Grandma Viv for the rose, I kept it for the movies.
So. For every little object I assign some kind of personal value. Every little thing has some kind of identity and purpose for me. I have a box full of stuff that I simply cannot get rid of because it is full of magazines with pictures I like that could potentially be used for collages. Yes collages. I have another box with nothing but ticket stubs. Someday, (when I'm fifty or sixty) I will make an album, or I will somehow arrange my ticket stubs in some kind of order to where I can take a good look at all the movies, plays and basketball games I attended.
It is hard to let go of these objects. Some things I keep because people give them to me, others I keep because they remind me of someone, or something. It is silly to think that these objects contain the same value as the people that once held them. Because someone somewhere once held this one thing it leaves a mark that is hard to get rid of. The mark, is of course me not being able to let go of something. Once I realize that the value is in the person, place, or thing, I can let go of that object.
1 comment:
I keep an insane amount of stuff, too. The current winner is probably my collection of empty cereal boxes (we're talking dozens here), which I can't recycle yet because I might use them for...something.
My basic rule for completely useless stuff (sticks, old crepe paper, melted straws) is that I have to throw it out once I forget why I kept it. So now I go through my drawers every now and then saying, "Oh yeah, that's the caution tape I tied in my hair in the 7th grade. Can't lose that."
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