It’s complicated. I currently find myself on the brink of enormous change in my life. Though I am convinced the end result is going to be great, I’m in a holding pattern for now, with no real concrete start or end dates. Ultimately, for many reasons, it is causing me a great deal of angst.
(And by the way, not pregnant. People keep asking me that. Do I look fat or something? Don’t answer that.)
In preparation for all of this change, and really more in an attempt to alleviate some of this angst, I’ve been doing some cleaning in my basement, going through boxes, performing triage…
recycle/trash
keep and store properly
gift/donate/sell
I try to do a little bit of a clean-out every year, but I’ve never attempted it at this scale. I thought I would merely feel cleansed, lighter, and vastly less cluttered. Not yet, unfortunately. Instead, I’ve experienced a whole new flood of emotions that I hadn’t expected. This is most likely par for the course for anyone cleaning out a basement or attic. I found
- letters to me from my Grandma who passed in 1995 that made me feel all warm, but then made me miss her so much that I broke down in tears.
- a wooden puzzle frog/statue thing from my nursery that made me giggle out loud knowing it will be a perfect gift for my little niece.
- 2 PEZ dispensers that flipped my entrepreneurial switch! EBAY!!! Oh…only worth $1 a piece? One I will gift, the other I’ll hold onto for a little longer.
- photos of my hubby most likely taken within the first couple of months of our having first met that made me think of how happy I am that we ended up married.
But then I got a punch in the gut. The diaries. One was started in 1983. Then there were 3 others started in various parts of junior high, high school, and right before college. I’ve moved with them several times, and every time I see them, frankly, the angst sets in. I have come across these over the years and have sworn that someday I would look back and laugh because I would be so happy with how far I had come. But in reality, not enough has changed. I saw patterns that kept repeating…that I keep repeating. I found
- an entry from 17 years ago about Christmas that I could have easily written this past year…not in a good way.
- records of various levels of insecurity, from nerves to just plain self loathing.
- frustration over missing or being denied various opportunities that came my way.
- carefully constructed plans for losing weight.
- carefully constructed plans for my adult life that still sound fantastic, but are now most likely still out of reach.
I read, I laughed, I cringed in embarrassment, I cried.
I shredded them.
I had to let them go. Don’t get me wrong. There were good things in there. I wrote about how much fun I had at an 8th grade dance, about my guinea pigs over the years, Fred, Molly & Charlie, my excitement over buying cool cycling shorts, and the guy I had a crush on when I worked at Day Camp.
So all day today, rather than feeling feel cleansed, lighter, and vastly less cluttered, I felt like I had just left a gaping hole in myself. FOR CHRISSAKE I SHREDDED MY PERSONAL HISTORY!!
But those good memories have never left my heart. I remembered every one of them clearly without effort. They do deserve to be recorded on paper, but they don’t deserve to be where they were; sandwiched between pages of so many more things that were so crushing, they were completely smothered.
As I sit here writing in yet another journal…one that I can’t shred…I have come to the realization that I almost exclusively wrote when I was feeling bad. There were so many terrific things that were worthy of chronicling in those journals that I left to the souvenirs and photos that I’m wading through in my basement instead. Often, I wrote about some of the good things in an afterthought months later, but rarely in the moment, and rarely in any good detail. They were all very rushed actually.
I realize now that I have fallen into the same pattern, with a slight twist. Notice that my last blog post was from months ago? I think of things to blog about every day. I put it off every day. But here I was today, feeling really crushed, and I started to write. And I can’t shred this.
So in the spirit of this impending “enormous change”, I think I’m going to look at this post as a new beginning. I don’t have to wait until January 1st to start over. I just did.
Dare I say I feel a bit cleansed, lighter, and slightly less cluttered?
xo
en
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