No Thanks for the Memories

Wanna hear something crazy? I burned my high school yearbooks. (Insert gasps here)

It’s come to my attention lately that we treat trophies and photo albums like holy grails. An object that hails highly in our mind as being a symbol of a memory or accomplishment, but where is that memory really held? Things only have whatever meaning or value we give to them. The memories are inside of us, not the object.

That’s why I burned my yearbooks. Let’s be honest, most of us probably didn’t have the most amazing high school experience. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and away from all the immature drama and the stigma that went along with it. I never really had a “crowd” I fit in with, and I already had a summer camp job lined up after my senior year that caused me to miss my graduation ceremony, and I couldn’t have cared less. I was ready to move on, so looking back, I don’t really want to be reminded of all of that. My best memories throughout my teens were made outside of school.

The four dusty books that just took up space and were constantly being shuffled around had to go. Call it an effigy if you will, but ceremony notwithstanding, it needed to be done to release the anxiety and frustration that came with keeping them around, now 15 years later. The people I care to remember are friends on Facebook, but even at that, we rarely speak. We all have families, jobs, and hobbies that keep us busy now. It’s all part of the circadian rhythm that is life.

Alicia has started to do some of this too. We found disks that contained the same pictures she had multiple albums of, so we decided to pitch the hard copies in sake of redundancy. Digitalizing documents and photos is a great way to declutter, and also maintain the integrity of the items that you hold dear in case of an emergency.

I’m not telling you that you need to go out and do what we did, but really start to think about the keepsakes in your house, and what the sake is you’re keeping them for. Memories? Those are inside YOU! Objects, trophies, pictures, they don’t tell the whole story. You do.