Loosen Your Grip, It’s Time to Let Go

This weekend was spent going through everything I own and picking out all of the things I no longer need/want in my life. I wasn’t too attached to the furniture I got rid of, but it was hard letting some of the journals go. I mentioned earlier (in a previous entry somewhere) that I wanted to burn those journals. I haven’t got around to doing that. But, this weekend gave me a prime opportunity to go through them and rip apart everything I no longer need to remember. I destroyed 95% of all of the journals I have kept since I was 6 years old. It was heart wrenching as well as relieving. The memories I want to keep are already in my mind, and if I feel it absolutely necessary, I can write those down again. All of the letters that were sent to me from Ontario are now gone, all the good Ontario memories I have are locked away in my brain. All of the cards, all of the stray pieces of paper with angry “why me” notes and random notes I kept over the years. The only things I kept were:

• A written journal my Grade 1 teacher had us keep that made Heather Bedard and I laugh uncontrollably for about half an hour;
• A baby book my mother started filling out for me and totally didn’t finish – it’s neat, she writes directly to me;
• Anything my mother wrote to me (notes, grocery lists – I can’t seem to get rid of them and I don’t think I need to), including the last poem she wrote and her journal that she never wrote in (I’m going to turn it into a scrap book of her);
• This deserves it’s own bullet, a post card that my mother sent to her sister that she had been living with from Toronto saying “Sorry I didn’t say goodbye, I was too excited,” – she totally just vanished for a while, which I find hilarious and very much like her at that time in her life;
• Some journals I had never even really written in (I just tore out the pages that I had written on);
• Photographs; and
• Important papers that needed to be kept.

It was hard and now it’s all gone. It’s great. I feel so much lighter. I am not pushing my past out of my life, my past is my past and it is exactly what has made me who I am today – and, despite the bad experiences, I am grateful for it. I just don’t need it all on paper anymore. I can’t bring myself to read it now, so I doubt I’ll be able to bring myself to read any of it in the future. Why bother keeping it? None of it is anything I want to keep. I want to remember the good, and majority of what is written down is bad (or trivial). I needed this physical release from all of that sh*t.

Heather, Fergie and his mother have been a tremendous help with all of this. I can’t thank them enough, and anyone else who assists us with the back-and-forth motion of moving boxes and furniture. I am so excited for this. My cat is not impressed, but he’ll be cool with it all soon.