Today I am making a point of going through all of the old papers and things I have saved because “I might need them someday,” as my parents so lovingly tell me. I am rifling through old awards and bank statements and degrees and tax statements and intermingled with all of these are postcards and Christmas cards and pen-pal letters and birthday cards from friends I no longer speak to or have lost touch with over the years and those…those are the things I don’t know how to let go of. I don’t need my Sigma Xi award from undergrad framed just like I don’t need these postcards as bitter reminders of who I’ve been.
But why is it that the latter are so painfully hard to get rid of? They get reshuffled and reshuffled and sorted and resorted and stuffed in file folders to be forgotten about until the next time I clean. I’m an unintentional mass collector of ephemera.