Five banker’s boxes of ancient tax forms, financial statements, medical bills, and correspondence. Old, unlabeled floppy disks. And more than ten bags of old clothes.
I watched the contents of those five banker’s boxes ride a conveyor into a massive shredder. The nice guy who was running the bi-weekly Saturday shredding event understood my OCD’s need to watch those papers securely disappear, and even showed me how they’d end up in a massive bale of multi-colored shredded stuff, rendering them unrecognizable, to be sent for recycling.
I shredded the disks myself.
Goodwill got any still-useful clothing that I haven’t worn in a year or more, including clothes I had been keeping only for sentimental reasons. My bedroom closets still house a lot of my shit, but it’s all organized, labeled, or recognizable. It should be easy for my niece to sort through and decide if she wants any of it. If not, it’s all shredder- or dumpster-bound.
When the shredding was done and the old clothes tossed into blue bins at Goodwill, I felt light and floaty. Unburdened. Free. I didn’t expect that. I thought I’d still feel anxious and sad to see a lot of it go. But no – I felt great.
I haven’t read “nobody wants your shit,” but the title expresses a ‘truth (which should be) universally acknowledged’. I started Swedish death cleaning a year ago September, and took it up again in earnest shortly after New Year’s Day this year. I accelerated it in the past few weeks, blending it this week with spring cleaning (just so you know, I’m not dying, not right now, anyway, as far as I know. I’m just trying to declutter and lighten up and make things easier for my niece who is going to have to clean up after me twenty or twenty-five years from now).
I’ve freed myself from parts of my past that I’ve been clinging to for way too long. Some were shockingly pervasive, like diaries and journals I wrote from elementary school through college, every single one of which revealed, within their first few pages, a pledge to renew efforts to lose weight. How fucking sad is that?
I also found ample photographic evidence of many times when I looked stunning, even though I thought I looked fat and unattractive (and my mother relentlessly criticized my appearance). For God’s sake! I’ll be 67 years old at the end of June, and I’ve finally come around to concentrating more on maintaining my health than improving my looks. The clothes I like fit me. I’m still physically able to do what I need to do. Enough, already.
My old diaries and journals were also filled with the yearnings of unrequited love, the despair of thwarted ambition, and the imaginings of long abandoned dreams. Into the shredder they went. Not only will nobody want to read all that shit, I don’t want them to read it, either.
I shredded Mike’s journals, too — the ones filled erotic poetry he wrote about other women. I shredded the pages he filled with vitriol about his parents and brothers. I saved the poems and notes he wrote for me, and the few pages he wrote, very close to his death, that with heartbreaking clarity expressed his love for me, for Angelic Daughter, and for the home we made together. That’s the Mike I want to remember. The rest I have consigned to oblivion.
I saved a few things like stories I wrote when I was very little, and programs of (amateur) shows I was in, or recitals I gave, that I thought my niece might get a kick out of before she sends it all to the shredder.
I set aside a bin devoted to books and photo albums to be saved for Angelic Daughter, who I will ask be offered the opportunity to pick and choose what she wants to keep after I’m gone. But I’m pretty sure she won’t choose to keep much, if any of it. She’s not a sentimental person, and her amazing brain has astounding memory storage. She doesn’t really need to look at photo albums anymore. Plus, she’s been imitating my ruthless decluttering, and she included, in the stuff she brought me to get rid of, photo books I made for her of herself and her Dad. So she’s trying to tell me that she’s trying to move on. Or maybe they just make her miss him more, and feel sad. I stowed those photo books in the big bin. She can decide if she still wants to get rid of them after I’m gone.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how she’ll remember me, and whether anyone else will remember me at all. This letting go of stuff has helped me reach a level of self-acceptance I’ve never experienced before, and reminded me that, as I’ve quoted many times, “in the end, only kindness matters.“
There aren’t many, if any, people walking this earth right now who think of me as a kind person. I’m working on it, failing often, but trying. In the present wretched chaos of utterly incompetent, hateful, corrupt, and self-serving “leadership,” climate change denial, and general dumbfuckery (please see Jeff Tiedrich’s “everybody is entitled to my own opinion” for a near daily play-by play), I have accepted that the only thing I have any control over is myself. And if I can create a tiny zone of kindness around me, maybe it will spread.
Still shoveling out drawers and closets, gearing up to deep clean the kitchen, and hauling two more boxes of shredding to the car, I remain,
your more self-accepting, quieter (c’mon, I’m trying!), and surprised to feel so much calmer,
Ridiculouswoman