It’s December 2018 and I am on the balcony of my grown up apartment confronted by the boxes of my past. There are shopping lists written in haste (sugar, paste and silver thingies for ties?), stacks of VHS from 2002, DVDs from the subsequent years. In one box there love letters from past loves and Christmas cards from friends that have since moved on or passed. The clutter of my past is all around me, preserved in a forgotten time capsule. I am not sure how I got here. I have lived in my home for four years, in unpacking my life for the present I pack away my past. Tucked in the many storage areas of my home are memories from a time long gone.
A few weeks ago, I attended a talk on decluttering one’s life, clearing out the cobwebs of your past so there is space for your future. This talk, prompted this exercise of unpacking my past, bringing all of it out and dealing with it. In these boxes are love, joy, pain, strength, struggle, hope, silliness, failure and bravery. The conversations of my past, ones that I have locked away. Today I confront them. In order to declutter my past, I must sort my life into three piles, Keep, Give or Trash.
In these boxes of my past are printed emails from my mum in her final months. Emails that speaks to her love, her pride and some that almost predict the future of the loss of her presence. Also in these boxes is one of her old dresses. These boxes confront the power of my strength or lack there off. Where do these emails and this dress belong? If I keep them does my past and it’s pain and love send me back in 2009 in the happy days before it all went dark? If I trash them what does that say about her memory?
The emotions in these boxes challenge what it means to move on, in a box is a love letter of a love that never fulfilled its potential. I think of the words in all the pieces of papers I keep finding and what they mean. The words of my friends, my bullies, MY words. The sentiment of the VHSes and DVDs overwhelm me. We pack our past into boxes to protect them from the cutting nature of our present and the possible vulgarity of the future we might have – we protect them from the passage of time. Museum pieces set out never to be viewed, we take comfort in the knowledge that they are there.
There is a box that holds a stolen kiss, captured in dusty picture that discredits the photographer’s talent. There, in true blush of youth, my eyes betray the mischief and whimsy of seventeen. I often think of this girl and wonder how she feels about her story. What would she do different? Who does she want to be? Am I worthy of that dream? Also in this box are memories of cupcakes and happiness cakes, of the days when baking was my only refuge. Stories written in moments of brilliance and some not so brilliant ones, stories that found their way to me, people that trusted me with their words and journey.
In the boxes of my past live the truths I cannot and will not face. As long as they are tucked away in their perfect prison of remembering I never have to face them. Am I brave enough to see? There are some boxes I will not, cannot open. Fifteen years worth of history surround me, do I leave it, give it away or trash it? Are these boxes the sum total of who I am and without them do I know my own story?
Leave the past behind but take its lesson with you. How true is this? Do we leave the past behind and embrace a future knowing the lessons will still be there. Here my boxes tell a different story. They tell a story of longing, some regret and ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’. Keep. Give. Trash. How do you categorise your past without dishonoring it’s lessons?
Confronting my past is standing at the edge, jumping off the deep end with the hope that I am able to come out the other side having done the right thing.