I've always been a weirdo
collecting acorns and other normal things since '93 (plus, a book giveaway)
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I’ve been restless lately. It’s the changing of the seasons. Changing of life directions. The in-between moments. That liminal space.
Where everything feels stirred up. Everything is moving. Shifting. Shedding.
I know I am not alone.
I’ve had several conversations with people lately about the desire for clearing. A desire for change, movement.
Maybe you’re in this space too? Of cleaning and clearing. It happens for me in the transition period of seasons.
And so I’ve been deep cleaning the house and clearing space, and making room for a new season of life.
When I was younger, I would bring acorns home. And I’m not talking a few here, a few there. I would stuff my pockets. Every pocket I had. And then when I ran out of pocket space, I would cram as many as I could in the empty spaces in my kindergarten-sized shoes.
I’ve always been a weirdo.
Anyways. I collected them. A lot of them.
You know those vintage sun tea jars? I filled one of those to the brim with acorns I would bring home from the weird little oak forest that sat between the elementary and middle school in front of the school bus loop.
I don’t really have any clear memory of collecting these acorns, but I’m sure I did it frantically, before the bus would leave to take us home. I’m sure I got some raised eyebrows from adults who inevitably saw a wild mop of messy red hair tearing around the brush, picking acorns out of the dirt.
I do remember how uncomfortable it was to walk home from the bus stop with acorns in my tiny shoes. I don’t recommend it.
For a long time, I couldn’t remember a lot of my childhood. My memories from growing up for a long time, were just gone. Out in this nebulous, roiling cloud that I couldn’t grab from.
I wont go into the why of it all, but I will say this: trauma and alcoholism laid a thick, heavy, suffocating blanket over my prefrontal cortex that did not budge until I made some serious changes.
And after changing my relationship to alcohol, a ton of work in therapy, and on my own, I’ve been able to slowly peel it back. And it has been both a relief and a terror to be able to crawl out from under it all and get a clearer picture.
I have memories that come flooding back to me at odd moments, with seemingly no rhyme or reason. But it’s nice to be able to start putting the pieces of my 30 years back together into a patchy puzzle, that takes a more coherent form, day after day.
I don’t remember what happened to this acorn collection of mine. I think it was hidden in a shed for 10+ years and finally tossed by my dad at some point in time, much to the chagrin of my inner 5 year old self.
We went to an old friends house for dinner the other night. Their home was so beautiful, minimal, and clean. Cozy and simple and so well suited for them and their partner.
After dinner, on the drive down from the mountains I brought up to Ladd how I’ve been wanting our house to feel more like that.
How I’ve felt like it has gotten into a state of messy dirtiness over the past two years and I don’t like it. How I’ve been wanting to do a deep house cleaning and clearing. How I admire our friend’s style and would like our house to be more minimal. To which he replied:
Dins, you are many things, a minimalist is not one of them.
And he isn’t wrong.
Like my childhood self, I still collect things that serve no purpose. I like my weird knick-knacks.
But lately, I feel within me—the need to let go. Of a lot of things. Both in the physical sense, and metaphysical sense of “letting go.”
There are so many things we collect in our lives. Whether purchasing the items ourselves, being gifted things we already have too many of, inheriting things — there are so many ways things come into our possession.
Going through everything, I find myself asking so many questions of my younger self. Mainly: why?
Why and how did we collect so many drinking glasses? Why do we have so many craft beer glasses when we don’t really drink craft beer? Or regular beer?
Why do we have 4 slow cookers?
Why do I have so many pairs of socks I never wear?
It’s both astounding and horrifying when I think too hard about it, and inevitably have to stop myself from going any further because it causes me to go down a dark spiral about humanity and what we’ve done to this planet.
All of this is part of a much larger conversation around the throw-away culture of consumerism. But I am not touching that one, at least not today.
There’s so many other facets to this conversation of what we choose to keep and what we choose to let go of. I have a box filled with stuff from my childhood I still can’t seem to part with, but those items have slowly gotten packed away into smaller and smaller boxes over the years. What do we do with the things that contain such memories?
And something else to complicate it all even further: what do we do with the items of loved ones who have passed? I have a box or two of my brother’s things, and a lot of the stuff from his apartment migrated to our house and just became ours. Clothes. Books. Furniture. Electronics.
Some of it I’ll hold on to forever. Some of it I know I have to let go of at some point in the future. And all of that feels heavy and difficult and wrapped up in so many other things that it is hard to untangle it all.
I guess we could turn to Marie Kondo for answers. But I think of it all more in the terms of identities, and releasing those that aren’t us anymore. And how we go about making those decisions.
There’s a dialogue between the things we own and who we are. Our things say something about our experience here, as humans.
I think holding onto too much of things that served us in an old life and no longer serves us now, is detrimental for who we are in the process of becoming.
And so I’ve been clearing and cleaning the past week. Figuring out what I can let go of, what I can shed. And it’s a process, with a long list of everything that needs a combing through, a wiping down, a reset.
Tossing things into a box for donation is a great feeling. Dropping those boxes off at donation, feels like such a cathartic lightening of a load. And I am looking forward to feeling it sometime soon, when I’ve finished going through our house.
I recommend it. You should do it sometime soon if you haven’t lately.
If you have, what’s something you’ve let go of recently? I would love to hear about it in the comments, if you feel compelled.
I’ve picked up a ton of books in my life and found during this house deep clean, that I am a serial book collector. I collect them, and they sit on the shelf and I don’t read them and just collect more and more. I’m trying to change my ways - it’s an expensive habit.
In an effort to actually read more of them, and thin out my collection of books, I’m going to be sharing what I’m reading. AND. If anyone is interested in reading the same book, reply to this email with your address and I will send you the book once I am finished (completely free!). This is a first dibs kind of thing though. I only have one copy so it’ll go to whoever emails me about it first.
I think that sounds pretty neat to pass along my books in that way. We’ll see how it goes. It could be that no one is interested in what I’m reading and that’s fine—I’m happy to donate them to a library. I’ve also considered putting up a Little Free Library in our front yard but that is currently close to the bottom of a very long list of to-dos.
Here’s what I’m reading at the moment:
The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store by Cait Flanders (up for grabs!)
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (not up for grabs — this one will be staying in my collection but I encourage anyone and everyone to read this book — it has been a revelation for me)
Next Week’s Post
Like I mentioned above, I have a long list of posts that I’ve been working on but having a hard time choosing which one to move forward with next. Thought maybe I would let you pick what you’d be interested in reading next? Here are the titles for 4 of them:
