Do you ever wonder why some people keep every item they've ever gotten or received, while other people don't?

I used to keep every piece of junk ever. I had boxes of envelopes, diaries, tons of crap. Sticky notes. Notes to myself (I might add that my cursive is so bad that my handwriting is generally illegible even to me), books missing jackets, records that were scratched (no player), jewel cases with no disc, a broken drill, an antique iron bed frame for an irregular size bedframe where the iron is so fragile it can't be used or re-worked (still in the shed), costume jewelry, clothing, the entire Barbara Cartland collection, and the first 86 Star Trek original series books, sea shells, hats, pens, pictures of Nicole Kidman.

Serious junk.

I didn't go through some radical shift; I didn't wake up one day and, god forbid, turn into Tom Cruise and start jumping on couches and throwing all my shit out the window. No, slowly and over the course of the last ten years, I started purging.

It started with the boxes I used to keep all my memories in. Did I really need to keep every envelope that every piece of personal mail I'd ever gotten in my whole life in? No, I did not. So out they went. Hm. If I had gotten a card in fourth grade that someone had just signed, did I need that? No, and so into the trash that went. I've been doing this for years.

The hardest thing is realizing that I don't have to keep something because it was Grandmother Carol's. Just because someone died and left you something doesn't mean you have to keep it. She left me some jewelery and honestly? It was all junky costume jewelery, and appropriate to leave to a small child (which I was at the time, ten when she died), but when I grew older and outgrew it, I stopped holding on to it for sentimental reasons and gave it away. You don't have to keep something just because you inherited it. That was hard.

It's liberating. Why do we hang on to so much baggage in our lives? Someone said a word to me recently that stuck: simpler. I'm trying to make my life simpler. I don't need all that crap. I don't want to haul it around with me.

(I burnt my own eyeballs. I mentioned darling Nicole and Evil Tom in the same post. Bad Eliza)