Have you ever watched that show hoarders? For me it's like a horror film, I can't get through a whole episode without experiencing some serious anxiety. Really, lady? You didn't realize you hadn't seen all five of your cats in months?? Well guess what, they are all petrified underneath your boxes of figurines and empty paper towel rolls that you just couldn't let go of *shudder* It's terrifying.
This week I have been packing and have come to a shocking realization...I'm a quasi-hoarder. That's right, I am the diet cola of hoarding (just one calorie, not quite enough haha). I did not find any dead cats (thank god!) and so far I have been able to dispose of most things that are considered garbage. But holy SHIZZLE do I have a lot of unnecessary crap. I figured out that my hoarding is mostly school related. For some reason I feel like anything I have from school could come in handy later; report cards, notes, notecards, books, drawings, diagrams, you name it, I probably have it dating all the way back to kindergarten. Now, some of this stuff definitely has sentimental value. Like the five page (and five sentence) book I wrote in first grade that won some kind of writing contest, that I should keep forever. But my Introduction to Philosophy notes?? When am I EVER going to need those again?? Is someone really going to quiz me on Rene Descartes at random? (I am quite impressed I even remembered a name from that class, wooo!)
The worst part is I will be starting school again in August, nursing school to be precise, so in my cleaning today I again found it hard to throw anything from school even slightly associated with health care, i.e. chemistry, biology, anatomy. And these kinds of classes are the ones that tend to come with the most crap. For each class you have a text book, a lab book, a notebook and printed notes. And then I have note cards. Thousands and THOUSANDS of note cards. I discovered around the first semester of my sophomore year of college that the best way for me to study was to make flash cards out of note cards, the re-writing and repetition just worked for me. And I have learned a LOT of crap since I discovered the note card phenomenon. So I ended up with an insane amount of them. And I finally dumped them all today. All 5,000 of them (okay, so I didn't get a precise count, but I am telling you, 5,000 is pretty damn close). But they are all gone now.
I may have had a little bit of a pack-rat issue, but hey, I didn't need a counselor to help me cope with throwing all my stuff away, so I guess I'm not too bad off!
