thoughts while spring cleaning

It seems like a lot of us are cleaning. With, maybe, some extra time in the day and after we’ve baked banana bread or cut our hair or tie-dyed a sweat suit I think a lot us are cleaning things out. The garage. The basement. Our closets. Underneath our beds. When I returned home from college over a month ago I did some basic version of this. As I re-hung all the clothes in my closet, I threw shirts I hadn’t worn or missed in a donation pile and as I attempted to organize my desk that had more or less collected dust since high school into something I could finish my senior year at, I crumpled old papers and tossed pens that had long-since dried up in the trash.

But last week I decided take on the project of a room clean-out with a little more ambition – inspired by a conversation with my younger sister about how I could attempt to de-clutter my space.  I’m nowhere near done with this project and it’ll probably be an effort that lasts for another few weeks and I’ll say that I’m surprised how emotional the process can be. Perhaps I am someone too deep in her feelings but it has been an emotionally difficult process to de-clutter. There are parts of me I forgot about. Old versions of myself I have lost touch with. What do I keep? What should go? Do I get rid of something just because I forgot it was there?

There’s a shelf that runs across one half of my room about a foot down from the ceiling that was crowded full of “pinch pots” and tiny clay mugs – creations from my days at summer camp. I went through the shelf a few years ago and took down some pieces I deemed distant enough to part with but I went through it again more thoroughly last week and I condensed half a wall worth of pottery into a collection of just a few pieces. Some of the pieces were taken down and put into storage or my mom decided to save them but a lot of them ended up in the trash.

I couldn’t sleep that night. Maybe it was just a coincidence but it was one of those nights that just feels heavier, feels more emotional and for no reason at all. And my eyes, adjusted to the darkness of the room, couldn’t help but keep glancing over to my trash can, the outline of “pinch pots” and tiny clay mugs that didn’t make the cut peeking through. What did it mean that I was throwing that art away? I never took the time to really look at the art on the shelf anymore and honestly, none of the work was that good, I mean, I was like eight when I made it.  So why did I care that it was gone now? Or at least in the trash on its way out.  Wasn’t I supposed to at some point have grown out of this strong attachment to my childhood artwork? Wasn’t that part of growing up? But was I throwing away some part of my creative past? In my attempt to de-clutter was I throwing away a part of me? Would I forget that I was ever so excited about this kind of art if I didn’t have the “pinch pots” and tiny clay mugs on my wall to remind me?

Last week my project was to de-clutter my bookshelf – of which truly only one shelf holds books and the rest holds, well, I’m not really sure what all is there – that’s kind of the point of this cleaning project. There are some books I’ll never part with: the Harry Potter series, The Penderwicks, The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants series. There are books on the shelf I bought originally for a class but that feel important to keep going forward. And then there are the books I’ve kept and forgot about. As I sat on my floor re-reading titles I once got lost in I came across two books: Comes The Darkness, Comes The Light by Vanessa Vega and Cut by Patricia McCormick. Both are books about stories of self-harm and recovery and both are books I bought and read in late middle school / early high school when I was just trying to feel seen, to feel like someone understood me.

I had completely forgotten about these books and yet when I un-earthed them in my collection the other day they immediately came back to me. I remembered the comfort I found in those pages, the ways Vega and McCormick spoke to an experience and a struggle I, at the time, felt was uniquely mine. I decided eventually that I would put these books in the “donate” pile, figuring I’d never crack them open again but it felt harder to part with these books than it did others.

Maybe this piece seems like a big “to-do” for a simple cleaning project and maybe I need to stop attaching so much emotional weight to material objects. I admire people who are minimalists. People for whom de-cluttering feels simple. For me this process has felt heavy. It has been a reminder of the things I used to get lost in and the words I used to seek refuge in. It can be difficult for me to remember that you don’t lose certain parts of yourself just because you choose to let go of the physical reminders. I still get to feel creative even though my walls aren’t lined with “pinch pots” and tiny clay mugs. The impact Vega and McCormick had is still there even if I don’t have their books anymore. Perhaps they were the first to show me what it means to speak candidly about pain.

As I’m wrapping this up I’m realizing it may sound like I regret the decision to part with some of these things. I don’t. There is too much stuff in my room and believe me when I say there’s probably a lot more that I kept that maybe I shouldn’t have. My point is not to lament or even to grieve the clutter, instead I have just wanted to write and explore what it means to clean out your childhood bedroom, to share my thoughts on spring cleaning and what it feels like to remember the parts of me I forgot about.

I’ll end with this -

Sometimes I’ll click open iPhoto on my computer and pick a year from awhile ago and just start scrolling through the photos - trying to remember what I was feeling and experiencing then, and thinking if only she knew what was about to happen. I think about all the things the girl in the photo doesn’t know yet. While I was cleaning, I found a box of old printed photographs and I started to flip through them. Maybe it was because the “pinch pots” and tiny clay mugs and books from middle school had me feeling thoughtful, but I started to look at the photos and think about what the girl in them does know. What are the pieces in her life in that moment that set her on fire? What was she struggling through? What brought her joy? Not thinking about what was going to happen to her or who she was about to meet or where she was about to go, but just thinking about what lessons that version of myself holds.

We are the accumulation of all the different versions of ourself and all of those versions have things to teach us. I am reminded of that this week. I am reminded of my old habits, old hobbies, old favorites. Our childhood bedrooms have seen all those versions of us and in many ways this box of my bedroom is a time capsule, holding the various souvenirs of my childhood. Some of these souvenirs we will keep forever - like the pink bear in the photo. Some of them, like the books we won’t read again or the some of the pottery we never look at, we will eventually part with. But all of it is part of us. And it sounds cheesy, and maybe I’m too emotional or too sentimental, but it is worth remembering. I guess I just hope that as we are cleaning, as I am cleaning, we remember that this “stuff”, this “clutter” means something.