How to get rid of sentimental tat

Clutter, nostalgia, and the mortification of knowing that one day someone will have to go through your stuff.

Just one of my many keepsake boxes

An audio version of this piece (by me) is available here:

I have a box – okay, around six boxes – containing a load of ‘meaningful’ tat. In said boxes you will find a smelly leather friendship bracelet, origin unknown; a clay candlestick made in primary school that looks exactly as you’d imagine; an Employee Welcome Pack from Channel 4, complete with pension options, from my 2008 job there; and a CD from a teenage boyfriend’s band. His band wasn’t bad actually, but I do not own a CD player.

Recently, I had to find some important paperwork and so hauled out one of these boxes. I did not find the paperwork, but did find a 2013 couples travel card featuring me and my ex-husband. Handy.

There are legitimate treasures. Mementos from people – and versions of me – now past that make my heart hurt. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes less so. Photos, letters, trinkets. These have become crowded out, though, by tat.

Everything in those boxes I either kept because it meant something to me, because I thought I should, because binning it felt like bad mojo, or because the habit of keeping it became meaningful in itself. It’s the past made physical, squirrelled away under the bed. Yet, a lot of these things – these faded, torn, and occasionally beautiful echoes of the past – are weighing me down.

What’s it all for?

Many people do a clear-out when something big happens: a move, a breakup, a new year with its gung-ho optimism. I have moved house about nine times in 15 years, yet I still have loads of this shit. And please believe me, I’m not a hoarder – this is much less shit than I used to have. You don’t move house nine times (including internationally) without chucking stuff out.

It’s tough, though. I feel guilty both knowing I should get rid of some of it and about the prospect of actually doing so – as though I’d be disparaging my past self, the self I thought I’d be by now, or the self I might be in the future: someone with room for it all, who laughingly pores over it with their kid. Yet, what am I going to tell Billy: “This scratched CD was made by a bad kisser Mama was obsessed with when she was 13. Do you want it?”

I fear my reluctance to address the issue may also be attached to magical thinking: that if I get rid of it, or even think about getting rid of it, the universe will punish me for not appreciating the good times and good people I’ve known.

A dusty coping mechanism

My mum died when I was 20, and she’d been ill for a long time before that. When you grow up with the threat of death swinging over your head like a piano in a cartoon, you learn far too early that things are finite. That there is a limited amount of stuff connected to a person. I started collecting mementos young and treated everything with care. It’s why I still have 15-year-old dresses in good nick. (The fact that I hate them is, I have long felt, beside the point.) The deal I made with myself was simple: if I kept it, it meant something, therefore I should keep on keeping it.

This circular logic is ridiculous. But it did help. It reassured me that I would always remember my mum, my dad, and my grandparents when they passed. Being orphaned young(ish) imbues stuff with emotional heft. What I didn’t know then is that the memories that really get you are rarely attached to the things you’ve carefully saved. They tend to arrive suddenly, at the least convenient moments, and leave you winded.

Note from my dad, which is decidedly not tat. (And yes, I did eat all of the cheese biscuits.)

My new decluttering rules

I have found a way to let some stuff go without having an existential crisis. It’s brutal, but it’s working.

I ask myself: “If I died, how mortifying would I find knowing people were going to have to go through it? If my partner, friends or family were left wondering how much that CD or couples travel card meant to me? Do I really want them to think I deeply treasured getting 30% cheaper train journeys with my ex?”

Thinking you might die is extraordinarily good for decluttering. Imagining your people at a post-funeral sorting party (what do you mean you’ve never been to one?), holding up a broken harmonica you never played or mentioned. (Yes, I have one of those.)

One of my peak “I’m going to die” cancer thoughts was, “Koen’s going to have to deal with those boxes” and I swear the horror of it helped me beat the disease. The vision of my grieving love holding our newborn baby in one hand and my Channel 4 pension options in the other, thinking, “Why did she keep the paperwork but never actually get the pension?”

He would see an entirely new and utterly confounding side to me. This person he’d adored kept… moth-eaten leather gloves? A ballet slipper encased in glass? A ticket stub for a band she didn’t even like?

The thought is intolerable. So I have made some decluttering rules for myself:

• If I won’t remember I ever had it: gone.

• If I wish someone else would chuck it away or that it would get burned up in a localised fire so I won’t feel guilty about getting rid of it: gone.

• If I don’t know what it is, who gave it to me, or why it supposedly matters: gone.

• If I do remember, but it’s served its time: gone.

• If I do remember, but it doesn’t represent the person or time adequately: gone.

For everything, I do what decluttering legend Marie Kondo suggests: say ‘thank you’, mean it, then chuck it.

This is an ongoing process. There are a lot of beautiful and really fucking sad memories lurking in those boxes, ready to scuttle out and bite me with grief. It’s also particularly fraught when you’re decluttering because there is still a fear that you must. That you’re doing it to save someone else having to do what you had to do for both of your parents: try to memorialise a life from things.

It’s not just about saving Koen, Billy and my friends from possible future sadness and befuddlement, though. It’s also me chipping away at the feeling that I’m being held in place. That lots of these things don’t bring me joy or pleasure anymore. That sometimes, even just knowing they’re lurking under the bed feels like fingers gripping onto my ankles. There’s a version of holding onto things that’s an act of love and tribute, and a version rooted in fear, guilt and shame. I’m trying to learn the difference now so I can clear out some space – under my bed, yes, but also in the middle of my chest.

My childhood pottery joy

Just One More Thing

I have started my 21-month post-cancer tests and have had an iffy result that needs further investigation. This is pretty terrifying. It’s also made me more determined than ever to streamline. If further tests are bad, there’s less for me and Koen to worry about. If they’re good (fingers, toes, eyes, and legs crossed), it’ll make me feel less beholden to a past defined by things. I don’t have stuff to represent all of the best moments in my life. I have a rush of warm feelings, tingling fingers, and prickling behind the eyes. I have flashes of scenes that make me catch my breath, bite my lip, and bark out a laugh. That’s enough.

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