Blog Every Day in July: Day 21, Memories in Boxes

My room isn't quite finished yet, I still have a couple of DIY projects to complete and I still need some more coral accents to diffuse all the turquoise, but all of the main furniture is now in place so there was no reason for me to stay in my old room.  Tonight is the first night that I'm sleeping in my new room, and I am SUPER excited!

I'm not really the kind of person that gets like teary eyed about leaving my childhood bedroom behind.  As terrified as I am of the future, I still like to embrace moving forward wholeheartedly.  Which is why I was surprised at the amount of things I held onto when I was sorting through all of my stuff.

I'm not a hoarder or anything, I just kept more things than I thought I would.  I like the idea of pulling out a box stuffed with old photos and trinkets and being able to relive the memories associated with them.  I had a lot of keepsakes scattered around my old room, and those were kind of the main decor.  I had old access passes from choir performances hanging on the walls, and pins tacked onto a memory board, and old photos and postcards held together with ribbon.  I didn't realize how much of this stuff I had on display until the time came for me to decide whether to keep them or toss them.

I was pretty ruthless when it came to my giant collection of duck paraphernalia.  I guess I was a pretty enthusiastic collector.  I held onto the bare minimum, which fit squarely onto the empty spaces on my bookshelf.  Surely if I could give up mass quantities of my beloved rubber ducks, everything else would be easy.

Uhhh no.

I don't really mind the fact that I held onto a lot of stuff.  It all fit neatly into four shoeboxes that will sit on a shelf in my closet.  The boxes are not quite out of reach in my closet, but they are up high enough that I would have to make an event of sorting through them.  Which is probably what works best.

I think that part of me realized that having a physical reminder of the things that happened in your life is pretty important.  A lot of the pictures that I take now are thrown up on Facebook or Instagram in the moment and I don't really have to make an event of getting prints made.  I don't even use a real camera anymore, just my cell phone.  I couldn't tell you where half of the pictures I took in college wound up.  At this point, I think I'll hold onto whatever is tangible from these last few years.  What if the internet blows up??  Where will all of my memories go???

For now, I'll keep what I can in boxes.