I am terrified of the television show “Hoarders.” Not only because they find dead things buried under years of hamburger wrappers and old Lillian Vernon catalogues, but because I’m scared that I could quite easily become a hoarder myself. Understand that my personal definition of hoarding is not defined by what we are shown on TV, but by what my mother would consider hoarding. That is to say, what most other people would just consider clutter.
When I first moved to New York, I shared a one-and-a-half room apartment with my friend Jennifer for a few weeks before moving into my first place with her boyfriend, Charlie. He ended up staying at her place, which got crowded, and I had a large first floor apartment basically to myself, so we eventually switched places and I took Jenn’s apartment and she and Charlie stayed in the bigger place. Jenn’s place was furnished, and I had furniture of my own, so the one and half rooms filled up very quickly. I had no intention of staying in that apartment very long – there was no kitchen and I had to share a bathroom in the hallway with everyone else that lived on my floor – so I kept all my moving boxes so I wouldn’t have to buy more when the time came to move out. No one was more surprised than I when it took me 2 years to leave that place.
One can accumulate a lot of things in two years. I seem to accumulate mail. I have an ever-increasing fear of identity theft, so I don’t ever throw anything out that has my personal information on it unless it’s been shredded first. I’ve already blown out the motors on two shredders. I also have a fear of the IRS coming after me and demanding I present all my bank and credit card statements to them. Why they would do this, I couldn’t say, but I never said the fear was rational. So I have shoeboxes full of old bank and credit card and student loan statements in my storage unit in New York. I should probably throw them out or spend the time to scan them into my computer and throw out the hard copies, but that requires time. And a scanner. And who has either of those these days? Not me!
I am always amazed at how much junk I tend to accumulate. Every time I move – and that’s been a lot – especially since The Incident – I get angry at myself for the amount of clothing and paper and books and just…stuff…that I’ve collected and then I spend far more time that I’d like to sort through everything and purge.
Purging is hard, though. You have to let go and trust that you will not, in fact, wear that t-shirt that you bought at Old Navy three years ago ever again not only because the armpits are stained and it doesn’t fit you anymore, but because there will always be more $12 graphic tees at Old Navy. That you don’t have to feel guilty about throwing out those personalized flip flops from so-and-so’s beach wedding 9 months ago or that birthday card that your grandmother sent you because really, no one else has to know but you. But I still feel guilty sometimes.
Last night I started to get frustrated with myself not because of the amount of stuff I’ve accumulated in my suitcases, but how much stuff seems to be taking up space on the hard drive of my MacBook. It’s a 320GB hard drive and I only have 50GB of space left. How is that possible? All of my music and movies are stored on external hard drives. The last time I checked, I only had 90GB of photos on my computer – now I have over 200GB. I don’t know how that happened. Then I took at look at my email accounts and realized that I had over 2000 “archived” emails – most of which could be tossed (and many that I thought I had already deleted). I may be hesitant to let go of things, but even I can recognize that I have no need for dozens of emails from Lumosity and Groupon or notifications from Facebook that someone mentioned me in a comment from four years ago.
So I began the arduous task of sorting through and deleting non-essential emails. I started by doing specific searches for things like LivingSocial and Groupon and then moved up to old emails from Flashdance and Evita from last year that I don’t need anymore. Like I said, non-essential stuff. Even after clearing out all of that stuff, I still had about 1700 archived emails, so I decided to start from the very beginning. I’ve heard it’s a very good place to start.
I scrolled all the way down to the bottom of my archives file and started deleting, one by one, all the emails I didn’t need. The archive went back to 2009 and, while there were some emails I decided to keep, I tossed most of them. What I wasn’t expecting, though, was the journey back in time as I read each subject line, revisiting events in my life that were both marvelous and humiliating…joyful and painful. There were the emails from the marketing/promo company that I worked for – a job that had been a life saver that turned sour. I traced my history with them from the day I was hired up to the day that I was fired from a promotion because of my looks, reliving and remembering all of the humiliating details. Emails back and forth from my employers at the other merchandise company I worked for in New York with abbreviations that no longer make sense to me, though I know they did back then. Shift requests and scheduling emails and emails about signing contracts for my tour of Junie B. Jones, about which I was so excited. And then the emails after Junie B. and The Incident between me and my former roommate about when I would be in to collect my things. The seemingly endless correspondence looking for places to live. It was a lot to take in.
Then I started finding the emails about Japan. “You should audition this year,” and “Welcome to DOC 2011!” Emails sent between cast mates before we’d even met one another, messages from our producers in Tokyo. I kept those. And then the return to New York…buying tickets to see Barry Manilow and Barbra Streisand in concert…unemployment paperwork…job offers from the company I work for now. It was all there. And then there was the paper trail of emails from the marketing company after things changed and I was no longer the golden child and eventually was let go for being “imperfect” and “overly emotional.” I was happy to delete those.
It’s amazing to me how quickly I was taken back to how I felt when I wrote each of those emails. The emotions still there, raw, captured in time on my computer screen whether I wanted to acknowledge them or not. But, hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, and looking back of the narrative of the last two years that I was in New York actually opened my eyes to just how miserable I really was compared to where I am now and where I hope to be in a few months. I couldn’t believe how much I was hustling to secure work to just pay my rent and barely get by. I had emails from the promo company saying, “Sorry – we can’t get you on the schedule…we’ve filled all the available shifts in the 2 minutes since we sent out the first email.” You know what I didn’t have a lot of emails about? Auditions. Singing. Acting. Almost none, in fact. There were a lot that pertained to looking for places to live – I ended up moving to new places almost every 5 months after The Incident because of money issues. There were a few emails about flying home for the holidays or pathetic, halfhearted attempts at meeting people online through dating sites. I wasn’t living the life I wanted. I wasn’t having any fun. I was surviving – not living.
I’ve recently been accused of sounding unhappy with my job and my life as it is on the road by a “friend” on Facebook. While there may be a tiny amount of truth to that – I am starting to nest and plan for my new apartment in San Diego, though I have no idea when that move will be happening – I can honestly say that I am in such a better place now than I was 2 or 3 years ago. I’m certainly happier and more stable than I was just before I left New York, and honestly, I think a lot of that has to do with being away from New York. Yes, I’m fatter. Yes, I miss my friends in New York and sometimes I get very lonely and yes, I deal with idiots every day, but I don’t worry anymore that the FBI is going to come to my door. I don’t get calls from collection agencies anymore. I’ve seen parts of the country I never imagined I’d get to see. I’ve made dear, dear friends and I’ve decided what I want to do next. Those are all good things in my book.
Today as I was purging I posted this status on Facebook:
My friend Ryan commented a few minutes later, simply saying, “It’s liberating clearing out that inbox, isn’t it?”
Yes, it really is.
Confessions of a Merch Whore 