About Loss: What Do You Wish You'd Kept? What Are You Glad You Tossed?

I swore, back in the late 1980s when Marie Kondo was not yet in elementary school, that I would never allow myself to deal with a living space filled with old, unhappy, smelly, stuff I'd probably never use again.

When I was in graduate school, working on my Ph.D. in the mid-80s, I lived in a small rental apartment in Manhattan around the corner from an upscale home goods store. On Tuesday nights, the store would discard their floor samples after closing time, and I’d be right there by the dumpster, waiting.

Unless something was going on at school—Jacques Derrida was over from Paris talking about theory or Christopher Ricks was over from England was talking about Bob Dylan—you could find me right next to the loading dock for the store, as clerks (themselves prevented by strict corporate rules from taking anything themselves) carried out barely used rugs, lamps, tables, chairs, dishes, napkins, and knickknacks.

Some of it was great: dishes that (mostly) matched, on which I served good cheap meals for years, and lamps that didn’t really show their cracks unless I showed you where I used the Gorilla glue.

I’d show people how I rescued objects in order prove my thrift, cleverness, and ingenuity, whether or not they wanted to know why I had a new if grotesque red vase in the middle of an only slightly lopsided tray table..

I rationalized everything and justified every decision. I could tell a story about every object.

It wasn't hoarding, exactly, because nobody used that word then. It was decorating. It was discovering. It was collecting. It was fighting off depression.

Some of what I brought home was junk right from the start: tablecloths where the color had faded dramatically but which were “too nice” to just throw in the trash (again). There were thin scratchy towels in a peach color I loathed which had also started to fray at the hems and never washed very well, but there was nothing else wrong with them. I used them for years.

The worst things were neither “knick” nor “knack,” including a genuinely hideous set of creepy holiday miniatures that, when grouped by the dozen, took up half a shelf and rebuked me in their innate ugliness for having rescued them when they could have rested in peace.

I felt no shame adopting things that others threw away; I’d spent my childhood and teenage years buying stuff at thrift shops. Good at scouring, disinfecting, deep-cleaning, fixing up and justifying how useful everything might be, I acquired far too many possessions for a one-bedroom apartment. Getting things—objects-- made me feel better when I worried that I myself wouldn’t become anything. There were many days in my late 20s when I felt that way.

It wasn’t until I finished my degree, got a tenure-track job, and moved to Connecticut that I needed to clean up. I was forced to clean out my beloved, cramped, and stuffed little place.

It was a hard process to winnow everything out and it was daunting to see how much I’d acquired without doing it with conscious deliberation. Only because I was moving into a new house, one I owned with a new spouse, was it necessary for me to make the decision not carrying my old baggage with me, figuratively or literally.

And so I am witness to the fact that a person can indeed live without her original Beatles LPs, the cork platform shoes she wore to her prom, her collection of snow globes, stacks of old magazines that might have humorously antiquated articles in them, hats from the 1930s (decorative but unwearable), pens that are beautifully designed but don’t work, and books that she suspects she’ll never read again.

The books were the hardest things to release back into the wild, but I did. I knew copies would be available in public libraries. I kept only my favorites (full disclosure: there were about 200 favorites).

Just as I don’t regret that I crowded myself with half-intact items for comfort when I needed it, I now don’t regret one thing I donated or threw away.

Other people, in contrast, have deep and fascinating regrets about what they feel as the genuine pain of loss when they consider things they threw away or gave away. I’ll be dealing with their stories in the next installment of “What Do You Wish You’d Kept?”