The End of Keeping Everything

I spent a Sunday deciding what we no longer needed. I underestimated, significantly, how long this would take.

Not because there was so much to go through — though there was — but because the decision-making around objects is its own invisible labour. Every object has a history. Every object is the residue of a decision someone made, or a gift someone gave, or a phase of life someone lived. Deciding to release it requires a small moment of reckoning.

This reckoning sits primarily with whoever holds the household's emotional memory.

In our house, that's me.

I know where everything came from. I know which mug was a gift, which picture was from the flat before the flat before this one, which box of books represents a version of the person I was in my early twenties. This knowledge isn't neutral. It makes me slow and careful and occasionally slightly sad in a way that looks, from the outside, like I'm just standing in the kitchen not doing anything.

He came to help and was immediately efficient. He is not slowed by emotional memory in the same way. He put three boxes in the hallway in the time it took me to decide about a blender.

This is not better or worse. It's just that the end of keeping everything costs different things depending on who you are.

The Sunday finished. The house is lighter. I'm glad.