Why Did I Save All This Stuff??
This weekend, I climbed into my attic to tackle something I have avoided for years: the giant bins filled with my children’s school papers and artwork, old letters and cards, and all the random keepsakes our family has collected over the decades.
My kids are 24 and 30 years old now, and let me tell you, it is A LOT. I’m nowhere near done.
As a professional organizer, you might assume I had this completely under control. Honestly, I thought I did too. I truly believed I had already done a pretty good job of filtering things down over the years.
For example, I didn’t keep every single math worksheet. I only kept the tests.
See? Responsible.
Except now, decades later, I don’t want the math tests either.
What I realized while sitting in the middle of a giant memory pile this weekend is that I don’t actually care about the grades or assignments anymore. What I treasure are the things my children created themselves: the stories they wrote, the drawings they made (the good ones), the little handmade cards, and the random bits of writing that captured exactly who they were at that moment in time.
And even after narrowing it down to only those kinds of things, it still feels overwhelming.
There is something emotionally exhausting about going through thirty or forty years of memories all at once. Every box leads to another memory, another decision, another moment where you stop and think, “Oh wow, I forgot about this.”
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I also uncovered hundreds of letters and cards from different seasons of my life. There were letters between my husband and me from when we were dating in high school and college, back when long-distance phone calls were expensive and we didn’t have texting, email, FaceTime, or cell phones. We wrote letters instead—real letters, pages and pages of them.
But it wasn’t just letters from my boyfriend. There were notes from friends during summers apart or while away at college, letters from when we moved out of state, and cards and notes from grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and even pen pals.
Reading through them instantly transported me back to being ten, seventeen, twenty-five, and forty years old. Some made me laugh out loud. Some made me cry. Some made me cringe a little. And some made me think, “Wow… I cannot believe I saved this.”
And honestly, those letters are incredibly precious to me.
But there were also SO MANY of them.
The same thing happened with greeting cards. Apparently, I have been saving cards for about fifty years now, which sounds sweet until you are sitting on the floor surrounded by giant piles of them wondering why you felt emotionally attached to every birthday card anyone has ever given you.
As I sorted through them, though, I noticed something interesting. The cards that meant the most to me were not necessarily the oldest ones or even the ones connected to the biggest occasions. The ones I kept stopping to read were the cards with handwritten notes, personal messages, inside jokes, or meaningful words written specifically to me.
The cards that only had a signature inside suddenly became much easier to let go of. I already knew that in theory, but apparently I had not always been very disciplined about it over the years.
So now I’m filtering differently than I did when I was younger. I’m throwing away not only cards with only signatures, but also keeping far fewer school papers, and quietly removing any love letters I definitely do not want my children reading someday. (Some things simply do not need to become family history).
This entire experience has reminded me of something I tell clients all the time: we usually do not keep things because we are lazy, messy, or irresponsible. We keep things because they represent love, memories, identity, hope, guilt, or fear of forgetting.
Sometimes we keep things because our children made them. Sometimes because someone we loved gave them to us. Sometimes because we worked hard for them. And sometimes life just moves so quickly that we never stop long enough to decide what is actually worth keeping.
The hard part is that sentimental clutter grows quietly over time. One school paper becomes ten bins. One saved card turns into decades of cards. Eventually, instead of feeling comforted by all those memories, we start feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility of managing them.
I really do wish I had filtered things down sooner, not because the memories were unimportant, but because future me would have appreciated fewer decisions to make while sitting in a hot attic at age 57 surrounded by construction paper and algebra tests.
At the same time, though, I’m trying to give myself some grace, because every single thing I saved came from love.
And I think a lot of us need to hear that.
If you are struggling to let go of sentimental items, you are not alone. The goal is not to become someone who keeps nothing. The goal is simply to keep the things that truly tell the story of your life instead of feeling responsible for saving every single piece of it.
