The mornings are chilly, and the leaves are starting to turn. Soon they will be released by the trees. Have you seen the meme about learning to release things from the trees? They do it every fall and come back in the spring better.
Over the past few years, I’ve been releasing a lot of emotional baggage. I started in December 2020 by slowly decluttering my house. I was preparing to move and didn’t want to take all that stuff (physical and emotional) with me. And still, a lot of it came here.
Mike was a bit of a hoarder. He couldn’t let go of things that he thought he might need one day. He would also stop and pick things up on the side of the road. I thought this was crazy. As I was going through his stuff, I found invoices from his electrical business that had Xs through them as if they were broken. I also found many invoices from several years before that I couldn’t find had been marked paid. I thought about sending them out and decided that it probably wasn’t worth my time and maybe those people needed to have that money more than I did.
My mother is what I call an organized hoarder. She would buy stuff and then organize it. She also has trouble releasing stuff. When she was moving out of her home of 50 years, I was going through what had been my bedroom. I had a lot of stuffed animals. Some I kept because I thought they would make good Gestalt props. Some I put in a pile that was supposed to go to the Second Time Around Shop, the local thrift store. My feelings were that someone could be blessed by those items. Later I was told by John that he had taken them to the building where she stored her stuff. This also happened with a bunch of baskets. Why did she have trouble releasing my things?
In my room, I found a box of cards and letters from my college boyfriend. They went from we have a love that others will judge their relationships by to how undisciplined and spoiled I was.
We had been planning to move to Texas together after my sophomore year. When I went back to Manhattan for the spring semester I wanted to turn around and go home when I got to the exit. After Spring Break, I didn’t even want to leave Oakley. About two weeks before the end of the semester he started sleeping with the girl next door. So much for moving with him.
The last card in the box was one he sent about 18 months after we broke up. He wanted to start over. I got this while I was planning my wedding to Mike. He wanted a response. I thought about sending him a wedding invitation and thought better of it. He was the type to show up and make a scene.
I took that box of cards and letters home. When I found them again, I read them all, took them out to the dumpster, and being thankful for the lessons learned dropped them in.
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Onward!
