My relationship with things, or stuff, has been confused for much of my adult life I think. I am the child of hoarders. Not like the terrible cases they showed on TV where you have to navigate piles of garbage and feces, but a definite pathological reluctance to throw anything away. I feel like throughout my life I have been reacting to this upbringing with an over-eagerness to rid myself of extraneous stuff. This has even extended to other non-material things like, maintaining a work history for a resume, deleting social media accounts on facebook and linkedin without hesitation, and hiring a company to find and remove information about me or my partner on the internet (this is probably a good thing to do anyway, frankly, as the companies that hoard your data to resell it really should not be allowed to do that). Anyway, my reaction to hoarding behavior has been an equally pathological desire to throw things away; to erase history.

As a result, I've had kind of a constant feeling of starting from scratch. Because I'm so willing to deny my own history, I neglect recalling useful experiences that I have had, or connections I have made, that could have made life easier. So I guess I'm going to sit and think about how to better balance letting go and hanging on.