Lessons from a Junk Drawer
Living with the ghosts of our selves and navigating grief
I have a kitchen island/breakfast bar that has a few drawers and cabinets on one side. As the countertop is multipurpose, so is the storage. One drawer has flatware and knives, another has a shipping scale, pens, packing tape, and the like. There’s a junk drawer and also a drawer for spices. It’s not any sort of life hack (a term I mostly despise), I just use the space that way because it makes the most sense to me.
As my decluttering “adventure” progresses, I decided that going through the these drawers would be a pretty simple task as what’s in them is likely to be easy to make decisions about. Either something is useful and in good condition or it’s not. For the record, a small collection of “good” twist ties left over from electronics can be useful. 20 of them, however, is not necessary, though I’m sure there’s someone in the Midwest with a junk drawer who would argue that it is.
I started with my art supply drawer. I tossed a fair amount of pens and markers that were no longer working, as well as a return address stamp that I bought after the wedding that has our names on it. With that organized I turned to the flatware drawer which had a sizable collection of wine corks that my former husband had wedged into all of the open spaces in and around the drawer organizer. His parents collect corks and he had decided he wanted to as well, thinking that he’d eventually make something out of them. I personally think most things made out of corks are tacky but was fine supporting his excitement about a collection.
He didn’t take them when he moved out and I’ve just left them there as I had a mental block about throwing them away. (I’ve since learned I can donate them for crafts, which potentially perpetuates the existence of tacky things made out of corks, but whatever.) As I was pulling them out I found an almost 10 year old champagne cork that I had written our engagement date on.
With a clean flatware drawer, I moved onto another junk/tool drawer. Stuff like pliers, a lint remover, flashlights, hard candy—haphazardly organized and in desperate need of sorting.
As I emptied it out I could feel a rising bubble of overwhelm that I didn’t understand. I have no significant emotional attachment to the corks or the return address stamp. If I hadn’t found the champagne cork I wouldn’t have remembered it existed. I’m totally fine throwing away twist ties. Why the hell was I crying? There’s no crying in drawer organizing!
A quick search about the grief of decluttering brought up a ton of results about the difficulty of going through things after the death of a loved one. This comes as no surprise. We attach memories of the person to their things and making numerous decisions is exhausting and we often don’t give ourselves enough space to process it all. However that had nothing to do with what I was experiencing. Or did it?
What if the loved one who died is yourself?
What if the memories that are triggered are the times you could’ve chosen a different path but you didn’t?
Can we experience grief over a past that we wanted but didn’t happen?
A lot of the things I’m coming across don’t hold a cherished memory that I’m hesitant to let go of, but rather reflections of a disingenuous version of me that I don’t want to face. With nearly every space I sort through, I hear echoes of past arguments and judgments that happened when I tried to express my true self. I feel guilt when finding gifts that I never used because they were for this person I put forth who would probably like them, meanwhile the person I was hiding didn’t and was sad about not being seen. (Not realizing at the time that you can’t be seen when you’re hiding.) I feel ashamed by things I bought and rarely wore because I thought having them would somehow bring about a feeling of acceptance. I had mimicked my in-laws by wearing chunky statement necklaces and blanket scarves and knee-high suede boots with skinny jeans even though that is far from my personal style. (I actually like blanket scarves because I like blankets, but I have no clue how to wear them.)
I spent a decade blindly attempting to meet society’s benchmarks of a “good life” (lucrative career, spouse, etc.). I created a false self because I thought I needed those things to be happy and who I was had been unsuccessful at bringing those things into my life. I thought eventually when I found those things but still wasn’t all that happy that if I projected happiness it would feel real and the “make it” part of “fake it til you make it” would happen. It all sounds calculated in retrospect but I most certainly wasn’t aware I was doing this. I’ve spent the last 4 years working on confronting, accepting, and letting go of that false self. Now that I’m diving into letting go of the things that represented her, I’m facing a completely unknown future with an almost completely unknown self. It’s a little exciting but also pretty frightening considering that the possibilities of what I can do now are much more limited than if I had figured this out before 2020. I really should’ve planned my enlightenment for earlier in my lifetime when the economy was better.
I never would have guessed that shoving things into random places because I didn’t know where to put them was actually setting emotional landmines for my future self. I’m grateful that I can navigate the blasts a little better now than I would have previously, but it’s still difficult nonetheless. Forget sparking joy, does it spark an existential crisis and trigger underlying doubt about identity? Now that’s a Netflix reality show I would watch.
