Nothing frees me like getting rid of stuff. My house, like my life, is always cluttered. Right now as I sit here with my laptop, on my kitchen table there are three electricity bills: one for this house, one for the alarm system in a three family house we own, and one for an apartment that was vacant for ten days. There are also containers of vitamins, one for my husband and one for me. There are three silver bracelets I took off when I got home last night, along with several pads of papers with notes on them, a 20% off coupon from Kohl’s, an ATM receipt, a container with napkins, salt and pepper shakers, two pairs of sunglasses and three magazines. I didn’t include my water bottle, a cup of tea and my cell phone as I will take those with me when I get up.

This is a good day. It’s usually much worse.

My cabinets just about close, I have a junk drawer in every room, closet doors barely shut, and framed photographs cover every table top. To make matters worse, my sister moved in over my garage last week and we finally cleared out the house where she has been living for years. It was our parent’s house until our mother died six years ago. The last boxes of photos, books, tools, and other items I couldn’t part with arrived here over the last couple of weeks, including a piano and a lifetime’s worth of sheet music collected by my mother.

I tend to be a pack rat. This came from my father’s side, not my mother’s. My mother loved to get rid of things, and through her I learned to love it too. It was how she de-stressed. But since she barely owned anything, the things she liked to get rid of were mostly my father’s.

My father had a drawer of Look magazines, trinkets from the war, and other stuff I can’t recall. What I do recall is that when my mother hounded him to clean out this drawer, his solution was to pick out his favorite items and walk them into my room, asking me if I would like them. I always did. That’s how I ended up with his most prized possession: a Look magazine about Flying Saucers from 1967. Of all the clutter I have cleared from my life, this part of my father has stayed with me. Besides winning the lottery, his strongest wish was to know the truth about UFO’s before he died. Neither came to fruition.

I seldom clean out clutter. I manage the everyday stuff enough to keep it from turning into “Hoarders,” but it nags at me.  And the more it accumulates, the more stressed and disorganized I feel. There are times when I am paralyzed by inaction and overwhelmed by a lack of control. When this happens, attacking the source gets me motivated again.

Once the urge strikes, I try to take advantage of it before my hoarder self regains control. I feel as though I am shape shifting between being my mother the disposer and my father the collector until I lose the ability to continue. I must devote myself completely to the task and not get distracted.

This year in particular, my husband and I developed reoccurring piles heading to Goodwill, or the library, or the coat drive. And our recycle bin has to be emptied several times a week.

Still there is more that needs to go. I have folders full of feedback from writers groups for the memoir I finally finished this year, some dating back to the 1990s. I just discovered stacks of information from technical schools and colleges my son had considered fifteen years ago. I recently tossed out my thirteen years worth of performance reviews from my last job. I retired two years ago. They seemed important when I walked out the door, but not now.

Clearing out my belongings makes space not only in my house, but in my life. Those old memoir reviews need to disappear so I can move on to my new work. I held onto my resumes and performance reviews from my job because the day I left, I didn’t know who I would be when I wasn’t a Deputy Director of Information Technology anymore.

Now I do.

I am an author who needs room to stack boxes of books. And a traveler who needs a location for suitcases. And a grandmother who needs space for her grandchildren’s toys. And a follower of yoga who lays her mat alongside her husband’s mat in the morning and does downward dogs. I am a woman who needs a clear mind and a clear space to continue to become the person still in progress and forever changing.