Holding On and Letting Go

This is my Facebook status right now:
I've finally come to understand that things are just things, and that I don't need them. That when all is said and done, I will be the sum of my experiences and the people I've loved and who have loved me, not of what I have accumulated.

Letting go has always been hard for me, and it's been a gradual process. My mother is borderline in to being a hoarder. She always wants more, and never seems to have enough. It doesn't matter how many projects she has the yarn for already, she always wants to buy more yarn for the new, shiny project in the newest issue of Vogue Knitting, ignoring all the many bins she already has. When that newest love affair doesn't end up getting made, she'll still buy more the next time. Or she'll buy all of the yarn for six projects that it'd take her a year to make, and maybe make one of them before getting distracted by something. And of course, when something is on sale, if you want it, it's okay. That's the mindset that I was raised with.

This got added to my own personality, a tendency towards collecting and trying to be complete and thorough and have ALL THE THINGS. When I was in high school, this was briefly a seriously problem, as it was the age of the Collectible Card Game, and I wanted to play the Star Trek CCG. But more than that, the cards were shiny, and I wanted ALL of them. I spent hundreds of dollars and all my allowance, and while I did end up with a zillion cards, I had no one to play the card with, and I still wasn't quite able to get all of them, though I got close. I came to recognize that this was not sustainable in the long term, and than my desire to collect and be complete was an issue. When I decided to play Magic: The Gathering with my friends, I did so under the express condition that I would NOT try to collect everything - a resolution which I kept. This was a useful lesson for me: I still wanted to collect, but I was able to control it. Definitely a win.

Still, throughout my life, this has come up over and over again. Once I get in to something, I have the bad habit of starting to think of it more as a collection and less as a dynamic reflection of my interests. When I got very into reading manga, it wasn't enough to just buy the manga that interested me and keep the manga I wanted, I started to look at it as a collection, to think, "I should get this because it will fit in" not because I particularly wanted to read it, to keep volumes even if I didn't particularly like them because it was part of the collection as a whole, and to keep buying series that I wasn't enjoying very much because I'd already collected the first 5 volumes, and I'd spent the money, might as well see it through.

These habits started to break 6 years ago when I broke up with my fiancee. We had excellent collections of video games and roleplaying game books that we'd built together, using our joint finances. The battles that resulted when we considered how to divide these things led me to be much less attached to things in general. Yet the manga experience happened AFTER this, so clearly I wasn't "cured." I moved 8 times in 5 years, and every time I would go through my books and try to reduce the number I had to move, but I still had about 50 boxes when all was said and done, and it was so hard to figure out how to reduce them.

The bed bugs were the next breaking point. In March, 2009, my apartment got bed bugs, and when that happens, you have to vacuum EVERYTHING in your apartment, especially around the infected areas, crate it up, and let the apartment get treated. Since all of my books were in my bedroom, a primary infected area, every single book had to be individually vacuumed on each side and on the front and back. It's amazing what you realize you don't need when you have to go to so much work. The most painful part was that, because of the infestation, I couldn't risk donating the books anywhere. It killed me to just throw them away (well, recycle them) but I did it because there just wasn't any choice, I had to pack up everything I owned in 4 days in preparation for the exterminator, and it all had to be vacuumed before packing, and so I just made the cuts.

I've been getting steadily "better" about cutting out the nonsense ever since. I moved out of the bed bug apartment in October, 2009, and have lived in the same apartment since then, and every 6 months or so I've gone through everything and gotten rid of more. I would always stop when I felt like I couldn't get rid of more...but that always left a lot.

In my last post, I mentioned "letting it go" as one of my strategies for trying to get through days when I was down. One of the side effects of this I didn't expect. Some days, it helps with my depression. Some days, it doesn't, but EVERY day, it has left me nearly desperate to go through my belongings and find more that I don't need. It's amazing how good it feels to let go of all of this stuff that I've managed to accumulate. After all of the prior reductions, throwing away hundreds of books during the bed bugs, all the previous 6 month sort throughs, I've been able to reduce the books by almost another third. It's incredibly liberating. I think it's the kind of evaluation that would do a lot of people good. For books, the process for me is pretty simple:

1. Have I read this in how ever many years that I've owned it? Do I still want to?
2. Will I ever read it again?
3. Do I have a particular sentimental attachment to this book? (ie, was it my favorite book when I was six?)
Those are the only questions that matter. If I've been carting a book around for 10 years without reading it, why am I bothering? Sure, it might look interesting, but it's not like I haven't been reading OTHER books - I'm CONSTANTLY reading, which means that I AM reading what I want to read. If there's a book that hasn't been read, and that I don't have strong feelings about reading it (ie, I don't look at it and think, oh wow, I really wanted to read this!) then why do I still have it? Some books have guilt attached to them - it was a gift! I spent so much money on it! I really thought I wanted to read it! I've had it since I was a kid! But now, I've decided...none of this matters. If I haven't read it, if I don't intend to read it, and if I have no special sentimental reason to keep it...then I'm not going to keep it. I bet, in a year, I won't even remember which books I got rid of. And if I end up regretting one or two of my choices, then so be it - I can always replace one or two books, and the difference in the amount of clutter in my life will be epic. Furthermore, whenever possible I can replace them with digital copies, which will still mean I'm no longer moving crates and crates of books around.

For other types of items, I'm taking a pretty similar approach.

1. What is the function of this thing?
2. Do I ever use it for that function?
3. Do I still like it? (in the cases of, for example, decorative items)
4. And, of course...do I have a sentimental attachment to the item in question?
And again, if the answer is no, I'm going to just take it all to Goodwill. This isn't always easy. 5 years ago I got it in my head that it would be fun to collect shot glasses every where I travel. Now, I've got probably over a hundred shot glasses, and have spent a lot of money, and most of them sit in storage. Clearly, I don't need all of these damn shot glasses. It was fun while I collected them...but that doesn't mean I still need to. On the flip side, it doesn't mean I have to get rid of every single one - I can strike a happy medium between keeping ones that I like and am attached to and ditching the rest. The same objections come up - this was a gift! I spent a lot of money on this! This was bought by me or for me from XYZ and I could never replace it! I've had this since I was six! Yet, not everything that I've had a long time ACTUALLY has sentimental significance, and many other things that once had sentimental significance, I've forgotten the reasons, and all in all...there is just so much stuff, and what is having it all getting me?

I'm not saying one ditches everything. I've been collecting art since 2002. I've built my art collection very carefully, and every single piece I bought because I loved it, not because I thought "I really should buy a piece by this artist" or "this would fit with my other collected pieces." Almost all of my art is up on my (now almost full) walls...and I've been looking at it on my walls every day and thinking, "I still want all of these." So I will keep them all. And I'm still going to have over a thousand books when all is said and done (which tells you a lot about just how many I started with...). It's not about cutting all ties...it's about making sure that what I own, I own for a reason, and that things mean something to me, that I'm not just carting it all around thoughtlessly because that's what I've always done.

I haven't figured out so much about my life, I haven't figured out how not to be depressed or how to get over my break up or how to not be pessimistic about my chances of getting in to graduate school or any of that jazz...but I can start to liberate myself from the shackles I've made myself, the ways I've cluttered my life and dragged myself down. Onward...

Let Go

My stepmother attends Al-Anon meetings because of the troubles she's had as a result of my step-brother's behavior and life choices. She used to blame herself, and right after she started attending, little signs appeared all her and my dad's house. They said a wide range of affirmations, but the one that always stood out to me is "let go and let god." Now, the message doesn't work for me at all - I'm not religious in the least, and in fact I'm an atheist, so I don't really think that god is going to be doing much of anything for me. On the contrary, I feel that things happen if I make them happen; good things take place if I work hard for them.

My road trip afforded me a lot of time to think. Before setting off on it, I wasn't sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing. As it turned out...it was both. There were definitely times alone in the car when thinking was the worst thing that could be going on - that I just went round and round, and got more and more sad. But the last few days of the road trip - early last week - I started to make a break through, and I was surprised to find that the biggest breakthrough I made was the addition of a single phrase: "let go."

When I'm really depressed, and I start to cycle through Bad Things I Probably Shouldn't Be Thinking About, there is very little that I can do to help. However, when I'm feeling neutral or okay or good and I start to go down directions of thought that upset me, I've now got a set of things that I can do that seem to help - most of the time. :)

1. Self-Acceptance. "It's okay that I feel sad/hurt/down/angry/annoyed/frustrated/guilty/etc." I've been amazed by how often I've found myself feeling worse and worse and I've just cut it off cold by reminding myself that it's okay that I feel however I feel, and that there is nothing wrong with me just because I'm still sad or still depressed. I've turned entire days around this way.

2. Distraction (and more self-acceptance!). "What do I want to do?" And then I do it. I've given up on asking myself "what do I want?" as a general statement, because in the past four months I've only had one, unachievable answer to that one. If the answer is that I really don't want to do anything, I don't do anything. I put aside all of the "shoulds" - I should be crafting for Nerd Wars! I should be working for my day job! I should be reading! - and focus on it being okay. Last night, all I really wanted to do was watch my baseball game...so that's all I did. It's taken four months, but the side effect of persistently focusing on only doing what I want to do and not doing what I don't want to do...is that I finally want to do things again! I've finally picked my crochet hook back up. I'm reading more. I'm getting more done. But it has to be constantly reinforced - I have to honor my own desires.

3. Ask why. It's very easy to get into a cycle of bad, thinking about all the things that I'm still hurting about, wishing. Instead, now, I try to think, "why do I feel this way right now?" This weekend, it was because I realized that it would have been the six month anniversary of my relationship, had it worked out. Realizing this didn't really help me feel better, in fact I think it made me feel worse, but I still felt that it was better that I knew than that I didn't know.

4. Naming it. When I've got enough spunk, when I notice things taking a turn, I just call it up short: "Shut up, Cushan!" (recall: I nicknamed my inner demon Chushanrishathiam...) It doesn't work every time, but if I'm generally having a day where I feel okay, this can really work to stop the whole thing from derailing.

5. Self-encouragement. Simple reinforcement stuff. "I look nice today," or "I did well yesterday," or, "I've been getting a lot done!" It's easy to look at things that "don't matter" but that you did and took a long time, and then say, "damn it I wasted all this time!" Wrong attitude. When that starts to happen - and when it does it'll always drag me down other bad directions - I just remind myself, "no, it's okay. I've done well. I made the choice to do this thing. I'm on top of what I need to do." Even if I do fall behind, I try to keep the inner message positive.

6. Let go. This is my most recent addition, my epiphany last weekend that has helped me a lot in getting through this most recent week, and it's clearly derived from my step-mother's Al-Anon signs. When I really start to cycle, I say to myself, "let it go. I know that it hurts, I know that I'm sad/angry/guilty/frustrated/what-not, but there's nothing I can do about it. So let it go." I've noticed that increasingly, this is accompanied by a visual: my fist in a death grip around...nothing, scraps of paper, air, feelings, I don't know, and I just visualize pulling my fingers away, one by one, and...whatever it is...blows away in the wind. There's nothing there, really, yet I can kinda...see it...dissipate.

Do these things work every time? No. Last night, for example, they didn't work at all - but I know for sure that hormones were involved. When I start really low, none of this makes much impact at all. I have to have enough spirit to fight back before I can really tell Cushan to shove off. But I've found that all of these strategies have really helped me on the days where I'm mostly doing okay but I start to go down lines of thought that upset me. I'm sure I'll keep coming up with more, sure that I'll keep experimenting and discarding. What kinds of things do you all do?