377 Days - Blog #78 to recycle or not to recycle

I decided to give myself a project today.  In an effort towards fall cleaning and some mental clearing, I finally determined to turn the room in which I have been depositing stuff (mostly photos and papers and kitchen things and an odd box of toys I keep for my nieces) the last two years into my office, with the extra window and extra light.  I figure I’ll move out the stuff, purging as I go, and move in my desk and shelves and make a refreshed writing space to focus my other working hours at the computer.

I didn’t get very far tonight.  I did check off the major item of removing a very old mattress into the garage, which I hope to empty into a dumpster before the winter comes.  I moved a couple boxes from one room to the other.  And then I started to unpack the milk crate.  I wrote about this briefly a month ago.  It’s a crate – not much unlike the ones I would use in college as a makeshift bookcase.  I ended up filling this one with manila folders of ancient manuscripts.  Well, ancient in Jessie speak.  Some files indeed go all the way back to elementary school.  A few spiral bound notebooks in which I started taking academic notes and then ending up filling with random scenes – or a second act of a play I wrote in pink ink during sixth grade, inspired by Back to the Future and Stand by Me.  Indeed, there was an entire folder of scripts – including some little collection of songs from a kindergarten concert play, that was the purple mimeograph of a teacher’s perfect cursive spelling of the lyrics.

There were stories from seventh grade that I wrote during class to keep from being bored and would then pass to my friends to keep them from being bored.  Thinly veiled allegories of our pre-teen melodramas.  Unfinished letters from high school and college.  The story I wrote about abortion in high school, when I was obnoxiously pro-life.  But two thirds of the crate’s content were one novel’s pages.  The novel/series to which I have returned, that I began in tenth grade and wrapped up sort of kind of in twelfth grade.

I sat on the floor of this room drawing in a lot of deep breaths wondering if I should just chuck it all in the recycle bin.  I have not read this copy… probably since high school – or at least very soon after.  I didn’t save it on a disk – though even if I had I typed it on that ancient IBM that my mother got rid of without allowing me to retrieve any files (and maybe if I think about that for a second, how much do I miss those files?).  I printed almost every page on a recycled piece of paper.  A lot were an invitation of an event my mother helped to host for her mentor who passed away at least ten years ago.  Some pages are flyers for things from Quabbin or even a random handout from a class.  I think that alone will be an interesting read.

I’m sure the whole thing would be interesting in a very anthropological way.  I could get a glimpse back into sixteen year old me.  The one who thought abortion was evil.  Who was confirmed into a devout Catholic faith, serving as a lector and teaching CCD.  I did read a scene where my heroine (whom I called Emily at that point) wouldn’t let her family eat without saying a prayer to our most holy Father.  Um… well… I think I might lose patience with that Jessie.  I’m sure I’ll also lose patience with the ‘love’ story.  My over idealized notion of romance and chastity and the female needing a hero to save her… blechity blech blech blech.

But… I still don’t want to throw it away.  Any more than those other folders.  Even though I am so far away from that naïve girl.  She is still a part of me.  Her hurts, as I read through a lot of those pages, still ache within me.  Even more now that I know how the last twenty or so years have played out.

So… I am deliberately holding onto those things?  

Hm.  There is another box in that room that I haven’t opened yet for purging.  A legitimate Pandora ’s Box full of journals and letters and random nostalgia of time gone gone by.

What is the point of keeping those things?  It is a good dose of perspective to see how far I have come… or haven’t come.  But that perspective is only as useful as the lesson I learn from it.  And maybe the lesson is to let go.

And here I am, also back at my attempt to write… and finish this piece of fiction.  Something has always held me back.  Maybe it is the weight of these folders and their mediocrity.