Let’s Talk About Stuff
Visual by Juliana Denrich
When spring rolls around every year, it is a time of bloom, a time of renewal. It’s a season where transition is palpable in many places. Carpets are rolled up and swept under, sweaters are folded up and put away, while looser, airy shirts are pulled out. It’s also the time where you happen to realize just how much stuff you accumulate. My family has moved around a few times, and each time, we’d have to confront the amount of stuff that we’re dragging along with us. Although it doesn’t seem like we’re getting any better at travelling light.
Last summer, my mother and siblings relocated once more from Qatar to Jordan, and while we unpacked dozens of boxes, my mother tells me that she’s tired. It’s not hard to see why; our apartment in Amman has junk left behind from every move we’ve made. We find a camcorder that is clearly a 1990s or early 2000s model from our days in Canada. The storeroom has the china set gifted to my parents for their wedding. I find hardcover books from grade 7 literature and grade 5 math. Just so many things littered throughout. We dedicated two whole days to sorting out kitchenware.
For me, one of my most protected belongings is a cardboard box--designated as my “memory box” where I’ve been collecting souvenirs and sentimental artifacts since I was nine. The box is totally full, the lid only floats on top. It’s tightly packed with birthday cards, notes, journals, school certificates, brochures, tickets, and trinkets that I can’t always place. Whenever I pull something out of the box, the rest of its contents shift and relax like a living, breathing creature. Needless to say, I’m hoarder. The box is just the best example. I like that in different piles of my belongings I can spot a timeline. I like that the old and new can coexist together and that a bedroom can be a museum.
But what is the lifespan of stuff? With the nature of fast-fashion and capitalism, it’s likely that I get rid of a number of items each year. It’s impossible to talk about clutter without mentioning consumerism and spending habits--the way it has become a sort of custom to excessively collect clutter, be it kitchenware or decor or stationary. These patterns of hoarding have eventually summoned the need for its antithesis of decluttering.
Decluttering is a term I’ve heard a lot of the past few years. Professional tidier, Marie Kondo, has published books and started her own Netflix show where she helps hoarders declutter their homes with her philosophy of only keeping things that “spark joy” in the owner. Decluttering is an entire genre of YouTube content. Minimalism and the minimalist aesthetic of rejecting materialism has developed into its own brand.
There is something to be said about digital clutter as well. Habits of clutter and hoarding have migrated with us to digital spaces. Folders of personal photos, saved posts, and documents crowd our devices. Social media profiles are a graveyard of all the people we used to be, and with the fast-paced nature of the Internet, posts are transient, which I guess can be liberating.
And I do have that habit of collecting trinkets - whether it’s lipstick, books, or fun socks. Yet the one thing I truly hoard is sentimental objects. It’s something that I mindlessly and impulsively hoard, especially since so much of it is paper. Paper is easy to hoard but a loathsome enterprise to sort through. It piles up surprisingly quickly, and over 13 years I’ve managed to amass a very impressive paper trail behind me.
Sentimental items are often their own category in any guideline for decluttering, and it’s the one area where I’ve gathered significant clutter. My memory box does have a number of very cherished pieces, however it does contain random objects that I don’t always understand the rationale behind. Admittedly, a broken keychain from when I was 10 does not spark joy. Neither does the broken neon plastic spoon I took from an airplane once. Neither does the note I fished out of the garbage in elementary school to see what the girl I didn’t like deemed so necessary to share with her friend during class. But these are all items that make up a very comprehensive archive of girlhood. They’re physical, concrete evidence of what it’s like being a young girl in a particular time and place. It’s a treasure for me.
(I wonder if I’ll ever stop being stubbornly sentimental.)
Memory is often unreliable. Objects are real and they’re tangible and they have a greater chance of outlasting you. We see proof of this all the time in antique stores. This Ramadan, we’re using the table set belonging to my late grandmother. And it’s nice to see the milky-white bowls and plates with the familiar fruit illustrations being brought to light once more, in a time when life is so different from when they were used last.
Some things only become sentimental and nostalgic because of how long I’ve kept them. I bought a blue eyeliner pencil from Claire’s when I was around 11 years old because I was tempted to try makeup. I did not end up using it much, though I never threw it away “just in case” I’d change my mind. Later on, it became a keepsake in my makeup bag back from “that time” of the initial curiosity of makeup. Only ten years later was it finally tossed away.
Sentimental objects are not acquired, they’re created. And the creation of sentimental objects is not rooted in logic. One day, a plastic pebble falls into your palm and you decide it’s important, that’s all it takes. I have no clue how to stop hoarding these things, I can’t tell what would be too much. I’m following an instinct blindly without questioning where it might take me.
My box of sentimental objects is not a problem for me right now. It is not a burden for me to have this box around, and I’m not tempted to clear it out anytime soon. But how long until it is? How long until it becomes a load on me to carry around to whatever corner of the world I find myself in? What happens then? What will happen to its contents?
The process of release in general will involve a lot of clutter. Keeping a journal is great, preserving tickets is great, collecting books is great, saving notes by my friends is great, however, unfortunately there will be a point where one day it will become too much. At least psychologically. It’s good to remember, but will it always be good? Decluttering is painful. Because you’re not only getting rid of objects. You’re getting rid of props that helped set the stage for a particular chapter in your life. You’re letting go of memories and feelings--though they might be feelings that perhaps shouldn’t have been around for that long anyways.
Though I’m still not very well acquainted with the KonMari method, I do appreciate Marie Kondo’s emphasis on intention. In her show, she doesn’t make her clients get rid of everything, rather she has them hold each item individually and assess the role it plays in their lives and in their home, and determine if the object upholds that role. If not, and they choose to let go of it, they say goodbye to the item and thank it. I’m aware that dragging around a box of childish mementos is not sustainable. I’m only 21, and one day my box will grow too big to stay with me. Maybe it’ll be awful and painful to dejunk my box, or maybe it won’t be so bad. Either way, it will be necessary. I just hope I’ll be ready.