how to declutter when you care about everything?
I'm back home for my reading week, and I'm finding myself faced with a very hard truth: I simply hoard too much for this world.
The issue with being a creative of any kind is that you find value and sentiment in absolutely every object you come across. I have rocks from the beach from 10 years ago strewn on my window sill. I have a stuffed animal given to me by a boy in grade 10 who I most certainly did not like back, but the gesture meant so much that it still sits in my basket with every other stuffed animals I've collected. I keep old phone cases just in case I ever need to use my old phones as burners, for what purpose I honestly cannot say.
The worst offender of the objects I keep are the ones from my parents. Most of the clothes I have yet don't wear are things that my mother passed down to me. Lots of really beautiful clothing that simply does not fit with the rest of my style. Or cassettes that I've taken from my dad's old bedroom (I used to listen to cassettes in elementary and middle school when I was much more enamoured with living in the 80s). A big fear I have is that if/when I get rid of these objects, I'd be getting rid of a fraction of my parents with them. Or even worse, that they'd go looking for them!
Confronted with the fact that in a few months time, I will have to move everything in my dorm back into this room (both the things I brought from home and the many, many things I've amassed since then), I've had an epiphany that I've had many times before yet again. I must purge!
I by no means can ever be a minimalist in life. That philosophy goes against every part of my character: my need to document and the collecting that comes with it, as well as just the simple fact that I love things! Trinkets! I sometimes liken my room(s) to one massive Wunderkabinett (something I learned about from my roommate, so very comforting to know that humans have always and will always be inclined to collect!). I never want to stop collecting or keeping mementos from certain points in my life, but I do think I need to raise my standards of what deserves to be kept or not.
I'm curious about other people's methods of discerning what to keep or not. Do you have file folders for all your little paper scraps? Do you keep shoeboxes of trinkets? How do you sort them? By era, by type of object? How often do you look back on them? Do you decide based on function, or sentimentality? The questions are endless!