Authentically Flawed

When I made the decision to move back to San Diego, I focused on the end-result. Being near the serenity of the ocean, focusing on my writing, spending time with close friends, watching my best friend’s daughter grow up, spending days on the beach with the man I love. I have a whole vision for what life will look like three months from now, six months from now, and a year from now. I’m sure things will change along the way but the basics are clear. People often comment on how I set goals and go after them, most of the time achieving them – and that’s always nice to hear. But…

What people outside my family don’t see is the sheer chaos that goes into my goal getting. This started to unfold last week as I looked around and realized shit, I have a whole house to pack up. And rent out. And I need to figure out what to do with all of my stuff. What to take to San Diego vs. what to leave behind in storage. Then I looked at a calendar. SHIT! I have like two weeks to get this done. I was immediately overwhelmed by how much needed to get done, and I hate packing so the task seemed insurmountable. I knew I had to focus on one room at a time, or I’d wallow in the enormity of it all. I started in my closet. As I was opening old boxes and bins, I realized I have held on to way too much ‘stuff’ over the years. I literally had bags of bags. And not like purses, I mean the shopping bags from Altar’d State, Victoria’s Secret, Sephora, Lululemon, and Altheta. In addition to old shopping bags, I had pictures of people I didn’t even recognize, emails from people I haven’t worked with in a decade, trinkets from family I don’t see anymore, cards from birthdays and holidays long gone, and whole host of other crap most people would have given no thought to throwing way. And I was not only holding on to it; most of it I had packed up and trekked across the country when I moved from the Bay Area. Why?

First and foremost, I’m a people pleaser and I hate to hurt anyone’s feelings. A lot of the things I struggled to throw out were wrapped in “oh, so and so gave me that”. The realization I had while I was sitting on the floor with my “trash”, “Goodwill”, and “keep” bags is “so and so” probably doesn’t even remember giving me the thing, let alone care whether I kept it all these years. And in that moment, it became clear that I had amassed a physical representation of how I’ve lived my life: I carry around other people’s burden’s unnecessarily. Classic empath – I absorb other people’s energy – good or bad (but if I’m being honest, mostly bad), and I let it weigh me down. It was the beginning of a great catharsis, and a massive purge. I pulled bag after bag after bag of ‘stuff’ out of that closet, and then out of my bedroom, and then out of my spare bedroom. Rather than just throwing things back in boxes, I examined everything. Read all the cards one last time before I recycled them. Looked at old photos and stored the joy of the memory before I tossed them. That scrapbook I said I was gonna make 10 years ago – honey, if it ain’t done by now, it’s never gonna get done. My inner dialogue changed from “aww, I remember this” to “no, Lex, you don’t need the parking stub from that concert, or the receipt from that store you’ll never go to again, or the train ticket from that country. You have the damn passport stamp tattooed on your arm. Let. It. Go.”

In my reflection, I also had to acknowledge that some of my hoarding was rooted in the fact that when I graduated high school, my family was evicted from our home. My family split up – my mom & sister went to the east coast and then eventually to Washington, my dad went to San Mateo, and I went off to San Diego for the first time. All I could take with me from my childhood home was the stuff that would fit in my two-door Toyota Tercel. The rest of our stuff went into storage, which we would ultimately lose, along with all of our possessions. I don’t even remember what was in there, I just know I’ll never see whatever it was again. So as I looked around at old electronics, shoes that still had Bella’s puppy teeth marks in them, books I’ll never read, and clothes I wouldn’t be caught dead in now, I realized the pain of not being able to go through those childhood memories was making me subconsciously hold on to things that no longer served any value in my life, simply because I could. I had the space, and I worked my ass off to make sure no one would be able to take it from me, so no one could take my “stuff” from me either. Well, it’s been 20 years this year so now that I can identify the “why” I can do something about it. Let. It. Go.

And I have. I am keeping the things that I truly cherish and getting rid of the things that no longer serve a purpose. I’m not living fully Marie Kondo style and I’ll never aspire to be a minimalist, but I’m also not going to drag around years of junk for the sake of sentiment and unfounded fear. I did make a humorous discovery while doing this, so I’ll leave you with a funny story. I have a ton of tape. All kinds of tape. Scotch tape. Masking tape. Electrical tape. Frog tape. Duct tape. Washi tape. As I found at least one roll of tape in just about every nook and cranny that I went through, I chuckled to myself. I told my sister and my boyfriend it’s as if I was out thinking we’d have some pre-apocolyptic war and tape would be our only defense. You’ve been warned fam; don’t mess with me. I have all the tape.

Cheers to Week 3!