Digging Through the Past 10 Years

So I'm home from college! For a month. Feels good. Feels good to be done with that insane class. Anyway, so I come into my room which is a messy mess, because my family randomly comes in and puts stuff in here because it "belongs to me" and it "doesnt belong in the rest of the house" even though, this stuff is mostly junk and I don't know what to do with it either. So I began the day this morning by cleaning my room, just clearing out the obvious junk, dusting, the usual. Well, I finished that early enough and I decided I wanted to go through my drawers....my memory drawers. It is hard to open them (I had 2) because they are so full. But they are so disorganized, which drove me nuts. You could pull some memory out from last week I put in or from 8 years ago, right next to each other. So I changed that. It took me, alllll evening and night and a LOT of laughing, a lot of memories to go through, and even some tears. Memories are very powerful. THats why I can never seem to let go of them. Although, I was proud of myself because I let go of this many:

Mind you, that garbage bag is FULL.

I am a pack rat, I love holding on to silly things, even small movie tickets. So Its a battle with myself, letting things go. But I have to ask myself with every item, "how does this help you in your future? Do you really need this? Is this a document of a memory that you already have in your head anyway, or is this something that really needs to be saved?" And then after knowing that it really doesn't need to be saved, I can throw things out. And, sometimes, after going through memories...you come across memories that you don't want  anymore, you want to erase them...and what better way to do that then to throw them away?

So now, My completion:

It looks like just a drawer of random files, but it is so much more. It ranges from high school report cards, to senior portraits, to love letters, to ex boyfriends, to letters (very many!) from friends in high school (letter writing was big with us, we didn't really use texting), to photos, to random gadgets, to printed IM conversations ( I used to do that-weird), to old journal entries, to my entire collection of writing (poetry, short stories, novels) all from High school and some college.

Crazy stuff. Shitload of memories. All good :) And the drawer opens and closes so nicely now! And my room is CLEAN. So, overall, it was a very productive day. Fresh start to my last college christmas break...woah.