smiles I feel so good right now. My nastybun headache is gone! I thought it was mostly because I haven’t been sleeping well recently but I now suspect it’s because I’ve been crocheting so much. Both my wrists also ache terribly, which is what led me to this conclusion. I guess I’ll just take a few days off from that and do other things.

I lay down for a couple hours last night because of the headache and played about an hour of Silent Hill 4 before it was too painful to bear. I ended up going to bed a little after midnight but I wasn’t tired so I rolled around restlessly for quite awhile. All I could think about was all the things in my room that I wanted to get rid of, namely a lot of the books on my shelf. I started to realize I’m probably not going to read most of them if I haven’t already so it wouldn’t hurt to part with them. I think I’ll still keep all my X-Files books though, since I have no plans of getting rid of any of my memorabilia from that show. I’m almost to the point now where I’m feeling this anxiety to just get it all gone as quickly as possible. Perhaps I’ll actually start boxing up items that I want to take with me when I move once I’ve gone through all the extraneous items. Then again, if these are things I can box up for months without needing them, maybe I don’t need them at all, and should therefore get rid of them. I only want to hold onto necessities for the most part. It must all fit in my car. goes off to look at roof racks again

Meh, I’ll worry about that later. They’re all pretty expensive, even on eBay. :\ I wonder why Yakima racks are so much cheaper than Thule? Strange.

One thing I’m puzzling over is what to do with certain items from my past, in particular, many items from my high school days. For me, high school was a horribly depressing and traumatic experience, as I’m sure it is for many teenagers who aren’t trendy. Looking at and touching items that remind me of that time make my mood gradually shift back to the way I felt then, which is something I never, ever want to feel again. It’s almost as if those things are carrying remnants of the actual emotions I felt, that they are tainted with this negative energy. The items themselves are fairly innocuous, but it’s what they represent that brings up all this pain.

Over the weekend I was looking at printouts of conversations I used to have over email with two brothers I met in my math classes, and I could only stomach a few pages before I had to set the stack of paper aside. It was just too much. These papers are now in the recycle bin, never to be seen again. I had mixed feelings about trashing them simply because I adored both of these guys and they are both incredibly smart and will do amazing things with their lives (one of them works for NASA now, from the last I heard.) But I figured that I still have the memory of our correspondence, and that really is enough. I also have several journals from that time period, which I know for a fact I will not be able to read for awhile yet. I still, however, would like to hold onto them because I remember writing some fairly insightful and deep things in them, such as what I believed God to be and what happens after death, and I’m very interested in going back to see how my beliefs have changed as I’ve grown older. They contain a lot of hurt and pain, but they also contain a lot of love and passion, so it’s not all bad. It’s just incredibly emotional, and I’ll have to wait for a time when my life feels less cluttered to reread them or this feeling of drowning could consume me.

Ever since I’ve decided I need to get rid of a lot of my possessions, I’ve felt their weight bearing down on me, and have experienced an almost desperate need to get rid of them before they suffocate me. I really really want to live a more simple existence, and not be so tied down to things. I’m slowly getting closer to the place I’d like to be so things are improving. Aside from these letters and journals, there are also other items that I wonder what I should do with, such as my cap and gown and my academic letter and numerals. These items obviously mean something because of what they represent, so I feel some trepidation over just destroying them. I mean…these things are nice symbols of my hard work in school, but they were never my goal when I was working hard. Yes, I wanted to graduate, and I wanted to be an honors student, but I wanted those things for ME, not for the awards they would earn. I never had a letter jacket so my letter remained in its plastic baggie, in pristine condition. This pure, clean, white felt “O” with the word “ACADEMIC” stitched into it in blue thread. This is not something that’s particularly easy to earn…I basically got straight A’s through school, so from that standpoint, it’s pretty valuable. But…it’s useless to me, and I don’t want it. So the dilemma is…what do I do with it? Because of what it represents, it would be a big shame to just toss it away, but it’s not really something I can sell. I could give it to some current high school student, but there’s a dilemma there as well because obviously they didn’t earn it. sigh I really don’t know what to do. I’ll probably donate my cap and gown to Goodwill because I’m sure someone could use it as a Halloween costume or something.

I guess I really should be looking at any of these items with the perspective of “Does this have personal significance to ME, or am I just holding onto it because I feel I’m supposed to?” That will really help me determine whether something has real value or is just for show. That’s a HUGE distinction to make, and something I never really considered until recently when I got rid of a lot of old birthday cards and stupid little notes that I thought someone would probably be upset to hear about me trashing. *looking at birthday card from 5 years ago…generic store-bought card…stupid saying inside with the text ‘Happy birthday Ann, from <insertnamehere>’ written in blue pen…wow…that’s so……sentimental..and……wtf, this person will never remember giving me this card….ok, who am I kidding?….*TRASH*

Mmm. I’m all ready to tackle my room now, to purge all this stuff that means nothing to me. I yearn for the feeling of freedom that getting rid of this stuff will afford me. The goal of fitting my whole life into my car is easily attainable if I keep looking at this objectively. :-D