Moving Out + Moving On
Moving is such a strange experience. Packing up everything you own sort of forces you to look at where you’ve been, who you’ve been, and where you are going. Doing this at the same time as people are making their New Year’s resolutions and the uncertainty of not knowing where I will be going makes the feeling exponential.
I’m not sure if it is a good kind of powerful or a hard kind of powerful, but the clean slate that is dangling just 30 days away feels both like freedom and fear all at the same time.
“The place we live should be for the person we are becoming,
not the person we were in the past.”
— MARIE KONDO
As I go through packing and labeling box after box, preserving who I am right now feels like pressing pause until I decide who I am going to be or where I am going to go. So what do I do with all the loose ends and uncertainty of today? I decided to forge ahead through all the to-do lists and unknowns to find the freedom of un-attachment.
No time like the present to discard old furniture and broken dishes to make peace with the past. It’s time to let go of memories and old throw pillows, which sounds terrifying because it feels a lot like being alone.
Usually, I associate unattached with ungrounded, but this time it feels more like possibility than uncertainty. This time I am letting go of the weight of mismatched sheets, old socks, and (questionable) choices of the past simply because I can’t or am choosing not to carry around the nostalgia, the guilt, the hope, or the weight of it all anymore. Let alone any more boxes of stuff I don’t need.
For one reason or another, the memories of the past have become like friends — there is the really fun one, the sweet one, the drunk one, the annoying but unforgettable one. These are what keep me company in the hidden corners of my mind — for better or worse.
In my adult life, I have moved 24 times. Just to give you an idea of how long I can hold onto things, I still have an entire box of acrylic paint from high school … and I’m not even a painter!! Clearly letting go isn’t one of my strong suits.
“You are not stuck where you are unless you decide to be.”
— WAYNE W. DYER
Letting go of the past feels impossible because it feels like part of me. I’m learning that it isn’t forgetting or denying the past, I just don’t need to carry the weight of it around like the abusive security blanket it has become. I can simply get rid of these things that no longer serve me — I mean, isn’t that what Craigslist is for?
So I am posting my couch, my ex-boyfriends, old projects, days spent in Napa, promotions, big wins and some pretty epic fails alongside my old curtains and dining room chairs. Come and take them if you want, these do not serve me anymore.
With so many moves and so many preserved memories, I expected the process of letting go to be harder. Sadder somehow. That’s how I know it’s time. Like an old boyfriend, you wake up one day no longer thinking about, these things, and memories don’t feel like mine anymore. I have outgrown them. I didn’t even realize how much I was carrying with me that I could just choose to let go.
Letting go always felt like less. Now it is starting to feel like more. More truth. More possibility. More choice. I’m not running away from anything. I’m not running to anything. I’m here — choosing — who I am, what I want, where I will go. Those answers are still to be determined but it feels like the right answer will come.
