Things you’ll find when cleaning out your childhood bedroom

I am cleaning out my childhood bedroom. The overlap of my college graduation and my parents’ decision to move out has resulted in a colossal purging of goods. This purge has been tedious and trying.

I am struck daily by how much a person can accumulate in a lifetime. Even now, when all I want is to travel far and travel light, I find it hard saying goodbye to things I had forgotten about until I held them in my hands once again.

The book from middle school I will never read again, but with a spine so cracked and well worn, pages are at risk of falling out. The beanie baby that will certainly be worth money someday. How do things find a way to manipulate us into staying around for so long?

The creepy doll

It’s a beautiful thing, the way the inherent creepiness of baby dolls are lost on the young. It is only as we mature that such plastic beings begin to disturb, like an infantile Mona Lisa, its eyes following us throughout the room.

My father found this doll on the side of a mountain in Greece. Actually, now that I type that, I’m not even sure I believe it. My parents probably picked it up at a garage sale, or the bargain bin of Toys R Us. Either way, whenever I look at it, I think of my pilot father, flying over foreign mountains, picking up dolls for his daughter.

Artwork

It turns out, the giant paper mache popsicle I made in seventh grade ceramics class is just as immaturely hilarious as it was the day I made it.

Diaries

“Yesterday I slept-over at Delanie’s house. It was so fun. We pretended that we had Mino-Klino which is a decease were you start throwing up then say mino klino a lot of times…I danced a lot, infact I have to say I think I danced the longest and hardest.”

Cow pigs

These I should probably keep.

Stolen library book

I couldn’t read Nancy Drew until well into the third grade because I found the covers to be far too frightening. Thankfully, my best friend Kirsten told me, quite bluntly, that such thinking was stupid. However, when you lose the Nancy Drew book you checked out from the elementary school library, then pay for the Nancy Drew book, then find the Nancy Drew book mid way through the summer, you decide to go ahead and keep the Nancy Drew book until you graduate from college.

Knick knacks

Where do they come from? Knick knacks seem to spill into my life constantly. For some reason, they are the hardest to get rid of. A figurine of a walrus is so small, and it is so easy to convince oneself of its sentiment and the lack of space it takes up.

A billion elephant things

When you vigorously proclaim your love for something, whether that be a color, animal, or hobby, your Christmas and birthday presents will inevitably become themed until the day you die. For me, the theme is elephants. Regardless of the elephant surplus, I still dream of one day meeting one of these magnificent beasts. Perhaps offering up my collection to the trunked gods will bring me one step closer.

Band t-shirts

My mom offered to cut them up and sew them onto this mysterious “memory quilt” she keeps talking about. Do I send the proof of my rebellious youth (I definitely was not chaperoned for all underage concerts) to the place where t-shirt scraps go to die? Or do I wait the 20 years to make donning a John Mayer shirt vintage instead of basic?

Old electronics

How do you part with the digital camera from middle school, which holds all the wonders of awkward school dances inside? I might need the old phone one day. In case of an emergency, where my current phone, and all other old phone backups I have kept, suffer a meltdown.

Things with my name

As people, we are constantly on the great search for who we really are. Accumulating various items with one’s name engraved on them tends to help with this odyssey. I’ve never understood the reasoning behind this type of labeling. Is it for others’ benefit, sort of like a fancy name tag? Or is it a form of materialistic confidence, a marking of territory? Either way, the 1990s and 2000s did not fail to produce an excess of “Madison” items, many of which were found in my room.

If I throw these things away, I will forget them in a day or two. If someone had come in without me knowing and rid the room of its knick knacks and sentiments, I would have felt the blow even less. How can you miss what you have forgotten?

It is when we must face these objects, to which we have attached memory and childhood, and cast them away, that a more vulnerable journey begins. No longer can someone sum us up by the posters on our wall. We must walk into the world bare walled and carry the billions of elephants somewhere inside.

And then, we can continue to do this over and over again for the rest of our lives. Because we just really like stuff.