Does it pay to be a pack-rat?

Happy New Year!

I didn't make a New Years resolution this year, did you? I don't think I have kept one resolution yet, so I decided this year to change things up a bit.

I've spent the last few weeks getting ready to move. I have to do it by January 31st but I'm stalling hardcore...While putting things in boxes, and going through boxes I haven't opened since my last move 2 years ago, I started thinking about what I really wanted to bring with me when I start this next part of my life. I made two piles of all my stuff...the pile that I knew I wanted and the pile I wasn't sure about.

The pile I'm not sure about is kind of like the jumble of saved text messages in my phone. Or like the memories in my mind I bring up now and then when I want to feel something I really enjoyed once. It's a risky pile, one that I could probably get rid of all together, and yet I'm too stuck on it to really want to let it go.

And so I wonder...am I a pack-rat? I know I'm not as extreme as some people. I don't collect things and I try to keep everything neat and organized. But when I stumble on a bin filled with schedules from my job in college, newspaper articles I haven't read in years, clothes that belonged to exes, little photo albums with notes and pictures that I haven't thought about in years, I start to realize that I'm not sure if keeping these things was a good idea.

So I threw away what I could, but I have a bag of things my body physically will not let me throw away. It locks up. I just can't do it. And then I think, so what? They are just memories. When I'm 95, going into a retirement home and sorting through the things I've collected over my life I will love to look back on that photo album and read those post cards Jameson sent me when he was in Texas that month and I was missing him, bawling my eyes out in Pennsylvania.

I made my way to my phone. To the handful of text messages I have saved from 2007, the first full year I had this phone. And I decided that in lieu of a new years resolution, a promise to fix something in myself, I would just delete the text messages so I could never go back and sulk on memories that I refuse to let go. That last cute text message from the boy before he decided he was suddenly madly in love with someone else. That message from the boy who was too afraid to tell me that he just "didn't feel it" but had the balls to text me in 60 words or less. Or the picture of the "bad boy" cuddling in my bed...months before he was cuddling in jail. What about the seemingly simple compliment from the really hot boy from the bar?

I feel like I need to erase some of the things from my past if I really want to grow up and try to make a great life for myself. Some things will just hold me back. But how do I decide what to let go of and what to let myself hang on to? I got halfway through the text messages (it was so easy to erase the harsh ones, but the sweet ones? I still have them...) and emptied my closets a little, but now I have to really just let myself let go.

2008 will be a year of sorting through my life. Moving on from what I need to leave behind and holding on to the things that I love.

I hope it's the same for you...full of health and happiness for you and the people you care about the most.