Filing Hurts

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:03:37 GMT

Thanks to a change in my work schedule, I now have Mondays off, which is fantastic because I have been sick since Thursday, and I get extra time off without sacrificing money. After driving home this morning from erinkyan's place, I thought that a good idea would be to actually start all that filing that I've not really got around to since I moved in, so I could declutter a bit.

This is a bit rambly.

I'd forgotten how much stuff I keep randomly locked away in my filing box. Encountered quite a few surprises, both good and bad. I found all my old SECASA stuff (which I'm keeping - who knows when that's going to be useful again), and I found old momentos from years past (one of which was a letter that erinkyan wrote for me while he was sitting in a cafe). And paper. So very many pieces of paper, a lot I need to keep, but a lot I ended up throwing out. It's actually kinda empowering - there's about half a moving box full of paper that I kept for one reason or another but I no longer need at all.

A long time ago, I made a conscious decision not to live in the past. I'm not the kind of person that keeps a lot of physical artifacts of history - the clutter that they create never seems worth the memories. I wonder if part of it is because my past hurts a lot. There's a lot of terrible things that have happened, and I've done a lot of stuff that I'm not proud of at all, and I guess that the safest thing I can do is isolate myself a little from it. Move forward, don't dwell on what I was, and instead aspire to be someone better.

But my past still has sway in who I am, I can't actually run away from it entirely. Going through my history, even if it's in old receipts, bits and pieces of con games I've run, letters from lovers and tickets to events, just made me go through a whole bunch of that history, and I'm feeling a little fragile from it right now. I'm glad I did it, if only because it gave me a chance to organise it a little better, so maybe next time I won't end up shocking myself with old memories when I need to find an old bank statement.

But it hurts. I can't wait for the day when the traumas become distant enough that I can look back on them safely, because apparently it hasn't come yet.

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The Journal of Lee Davis-Thalbourne

Filing Hurts