Fighting off the hoarder in me…

I refuse to watch the A&E show, Hoarders, for two reasons:

1) It’s a little terrifying to see people with all. that. stuff.

2) I’m also slightly terrified that I could be a borderline hoarder.

This was evident to me as we have been getting ready to move this week. You see, packing is sort of like dredging the bottom of a lake. It looks silent and serene until everything gets dug up and piled in a giant heap on the edge of the water. It’s messy and yucky and kind of horrifying.

Last Sunday, Ben and I pulled out all the boxes and bins that were jammed in the crawl space behind Madi’s closet. Along with an assortment of Princess House crystal boxes (solving the mystery of where all the crystal place card holders from our wedding went to) and Ben’s baseball card collection, five bins came out that were labeled “Rachel’s Memories”. This was on top of two more bins that were sitting in the back of our closet, a box that was jumbled in with the five boxes of my Cornerstone class materials in the basement, and one more that I sorted through last week. That made nine boxes…of memory “stuff”? Seriously? It would be one thing if I was super-famous and needed to document every second of my life somehow, but when I popped open the lids this week, I found such important things like:

Old play scripts from college…

My illustrious postcard collection…

My high school sports trophies…

My unicorn music box with the horn broken off…

A tree fungus with my name on it…

Judging sheets from piano competitions…

…and bundles and bundles of cards and letters. In a world where very few people write letters anymore, it seems sacrilegious to simply toss them. But all the birthday cards from when I turned 8 years old? Do I really need those?

The boxes sat in our living room until Thursday, because I just didn’t know what to do. Ben thought I should only keep enough to fit in a shoebox. Another friend I talked to about it was convinced that the letters were “priceless” and I shouldn’t even think of touching them. I just wanted to ignore it and hope it went away by itself.

Instead, I bucked up and dug in. My file folder of World Cup newspaper clippings and Nancy Kerrigan magazines? Pitched. My cards & letters? Slimmed down, but kept intact. My broken knick-knacks? Gone. All my schoolwork? Kept a sampling of my essays – rest in the trash. Graduation hat and gown and puffy sleeves from when I was in Much Ado About Nothing in high school? In the dress-up bin.

After I was done purging, I was left with three boxes/bins. The large cardboard box? Letters and cards. Green bin? Photo albums and other random stuff. White box? Filing.

Maybe in a few more years, I’ll feel better about downsizing again, but for now, I feel pretty darn proud of myself. I guess I don’t need any stinkin’ specialist to tell me how to fix my hoarder attitude…just a little determination and contractor size garbage bags.