The Purge

When we moved from Washington back to Virginia last month, it gave me an opportunity to purge a lot of childhood things I thought I would keep forever. I had a big box full of old journals, bad teenage poems full of angst, every note I've ever received from middle through high school, and odd trinkets from my past that I kept for some reason. 

I've been wondering lately why I am keeping these things because I just watched one of my friends purge her life- her home, her belongings and move into a really nice RV to live a simpler and more pared down life. It's very inspiring and has prompted me into thinking about the things that I really need in life. While I'm not prepared to do anything quite so drastic, it motivated me to get rid of some things that I had been feeling tied down to. 

My younger self had put these items in a box because I thought that these puzzle pieces of my old life would be interesting to me as an adult. "When I'm thirty, it's going to be so fun to read this!"

As I sorted through the box I easily threw out a gallon ziplock bag full of notes- I no longer cared. I found a notebook my (then) best friend in high school had passed back and forth for months and tossed it out. We are no longer friends and thinking of her is more painful than happily nostalgic. It was a more difficult choice to get rid of my old journals because they had been prized possessions for a while like completed novels that I lined up on my bookshelf. I flipped through them and they were just full of childhood crushes and other embarrassing things that I'd be mortified for anyone to read and that I'd like to forget. 

The only journals I've bothered to keep are the ones I've written as an adult as they offer more introspection and soul-searching than the schoolgirl musings of the past. I also had to keep my very first journal from fourth grade that was a purple spiral-bound notebook with Winnie the Pooh smiling on the cover in which I wrote about who offended me in class and the dead bird my brother and I found. Very sensational stuff. 

I kept three small shoeboxes full of mementos from Sophomore through Senior year because I decorated them and they had some interesting stuff in it like my Prom corsage and my learner's permit.

It felt good to be free of so many things that tied me down and that embarrassed me to know they existed (those poems...man, so angsty and emo). I mostly kept the things that I would be happy to reflect on and show someone else. 

But why did I keep so many things? I can only guess that it was because I was afraid of growing up and of forgetting everything. It was hard for me then to imagine what 30 year old Ashley would be doing, what kind of person she would be, and what she would care about. My younger self thought that these memories were worth holding onto when they were such a minute snapshot of life. 

I guess that's a part of growing up though, right? Knowing what's important to hold onto and what you can let go.