I Need to (Pretend) Move

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I Need to (Pretend) Move

When I first started paying for my own housing after college, I moved every two to five years. Apartment traded for bigger apartment, traded for row house, traded for free standing house, traded for free standing house with fewer incidents of people doing doughnuts at the nearest intersection in the middle of the night.

And with each of those moves, I was faced with a critical decision regarding every single object in my possession: is this thing worth moving to the new place? Every book, every shred of paper, every pair of worn out running shoes was run through that algorithm of “keep” vs. “toss.” It was Object Darwinism, a cathartic process of reaffirming that only the most important items got to stick around.

Especially once we got to California, where Staged House Mania was invented, the benefit of showing a home stripped of nearly all personal possessions was concrete. Conventional wisdom said that if you presented a blank canvas onto which the potential buyers could project aspirational dreams of full length mirrors, or a cluster of lithographs, or artfully stacked coffee table books, your sales price would climb.

So I embraced the expulsion, rejoiced in the rejects. Every two to five years saw this ritualistic unburdening practiced anew. Watching bag after bag of god knows what get carted to the curb resulted in a newfound feeling of lightness, relief that came from knowing that every bag tossed = one less box to unpack at the new house.

The new house. The one we’ve now lived in for ELEVEN YEARS. The one that has accumulated stuff like a cross-sectional view of sediment as shown in the sixth grade history textbook unit about epochs.

Things are put away in this house; they’re just never thrown away. We don’t plan on moving anytime soon, so there is no pressure to make Sophie’s Choice about things like books we’re not going to read again and Christmas ornaments that aren’t quite pretty enough to hang. Except the pressure of our belongings squeezing the air out of us.

Plus, in those eleven years I’ve become much more conscientious about not putting anything in the landfill that doesn’t belong there. Carting garbage bags to the curb just doesn’t cut it anymore. I’d have to sort into my belongings into separate piles for East Bay Home Depot, Goodwill, recycling, the consignment store…it stops me in my tracks before I can even get started.

But the other day I tried to a stack of the girls’ letters from camp into the drawer for my bedside table where I keep such things – see picture at the top of this post – and no matter how hard I pressed on the corpus of correspondence that was already in there, I couldn’t fit the 2013 camp mail. Tipping Point Officially Reached.

So it’s time for me to (pretend) move. I am voluntarily and artificially putting myself into that desperate, panicked state of mind that comes (for free! at zero interest!) with moving house.

Each week, for as long as it takes, I’m going to tackle one room of the house, not with a general goal of clearing up clutter, but rather with the eye of a person who is thiiiiis close to panic because she has to fill out change of address forms, register the kids at the new school, fill out the mortgage application and, oh right, find a new house in a market where bidding wars are the norm. Only with that level of frantic stress will I be able to achieve the mercenary mindset necessary to substantially clear these drawers and closets and shelves.

Would I pay a moving company to move the game Dog-Opoly to my theoretical new home? I would not. Do I need a pottery mug that so old that is is no longer circular but oval, and causes me to dribble on myself? Would I pay someone to move the small packet of pictures taken for my passport issued in 2002, since expired? Well, I was a lot less wrinkled. And that blue shirt really made my eyes pop. What? No, no, NO! Throw them out!

I did a test run with the bedside table drawer last week – see AFTER picture, below.

Everything in its place

The good news was that I made a big stack of things to donate, and took a small pile of things to the garbage. The bad news is that at least sixty percent of what was in that drawer is now simply “re-homed” in the black hole of storage in the basement.

I’m scheduled to tackle that room sometime in late November. Wish me luck.