Letters from the past
Saturday, June 6th, 2020 16:29![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zimenaI have a drawer in my room that's full of old letters. It has always been my "letters and postal things" drawer. Because I used to have quite a few penpals at one point, I sometimes emptied the whole drawer into plastic bags that were then stowed away in the attic. While we were working on cleaning out the attic, I found two such bags of letters, so I sorted through them some time ago. It was nice to see some of them again, because they brought back sometimes very specific memories... but in the end I can't keep saving all of them.
Believe me - cleaning out those bags and throwing away the vast majority of these things was hard work.
...the only problem is that the letters-drawer in my room was still full. Full of everything that had not yet made its way to the attic, full of memories and things and little gifts that I sometimes stored along with the letter it came in. In recent years, most new additions to the drawer came from music competitions and other non-personal things, as I don't get the same amount of personal letters anymore, so whenever I looked in the drawer lately, I thought that cleaning it out would be "easier" than the bags from the attic. It's full, so it's a lot of work, and I kept putting it off because the task seemed a bit daunting.... but surely it wouldn't be as hard as those letter bags?
Well, wrong. I started cleaning out the drawer today. Underneath all the music competition stuff (which I had agreed with myself to part with, because it's not something I go back to and look at periodically - it's competitions that are "finished" when they're over), I found a lot of personal letters, still. Letters from penpals in other countries, and even a few from friends I don't see as much anymore. I've sorted through about 75% of what was in the drawer now, and I might do the rest tonight or Monday, we'll see.
I see now why I've been putting this off for so long. It's stil hard work, emotionally, to sort through everything. (Of course it's not helpful that my garbage bag started to tear from the weight of everything I tried to put in it, so most likely I'll have to find another one and divide thiings more evenly between the two of them. I didn't have another one near me while I was working, so that's also a reason to "take a break" now.
Believe me - cleaning out those bags and throwing away the vast majority of these things was hard work.
...the only problem is that the letters-drawer in my room was still full. Full of everything that had not yet made its way to the attic, full of memories and things and little gifts that I sometimes stored along with the letter it came in. In recent years, most new additions to the drawer came from music competitions and other non-personal things, as I don't get the same amount of personal letters anymore, so whenever I looked in the drawer lately, I thought that cleaning it out would be "easier" than the bags from the attic. It's full, so it's a lot of work, and I kept putting it off because the task seemed a bit daunting.... but surely it wouldn't be as hard as those letter bags?
Well, wrong. I started cleaning out the drawer today. Underneath all the music competition stuff (which I had agreed with myself to part with, because it's not something I go back to and look at periodically - it's competitions that are "finished" when they're over), I found a lot of personal letters, still. Letters from penpals in other countries, and even a few from friends I don't see as much anymore. I've sorted through about 75% of what was in the drawer now, and I might do the rest tonight or Monday, we'll see.
I see now why I've been putting this off for so long. It's stil hard work, emotionally, to sort through everything. (Of course it's not helpful that my garbage bag started to tear from the weight of everything I tried to put in it, so most likely I'll have to find another one and divide thiings more evenly between the two of them. I didn't have another one near me while I was working, so that's also a reason to "take a break" now.
