Excess Baggage

I don't even know how it started. Ever since I was a small child, I've had this need to load myself down with baggage and cart it around with me wherever I go. I started carrying a purse (albeit a small, child's purse -- a navy blue, canvas affair, with a picture of a mushroom emblazoned on the front) in the second grade so that I could carry my precious baggage (in the form of a few small toys, lip balm, etc.) to school with me. In the afternoons, after returning home from school, before settling down on the living room floor to watch t.v. (Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Batman), I had this compulsive need to have all of my important toys arranged just so in a semi-circle around me before the theme song to the first show began. If I failed to do so, the afternoon was ruined for me. My older brother tells me that my nephew has a similar habit of needed to cart his favorite toys around in a little wagon (a wagon which I gave him for his birthday last year, in fact) everywhere he goes. Oh, God, the poor child takes after me!

As I grew older, beginning in my high school years, it was books that I felt the need to carry with me. Novels, books of poetry, journals, pens, paper, photo albums -- that sort of thing. These days, I tote a bag to work with me every day, filled with books, journals, papers, Russian dictionaries and workbooks, etc. I don't need any of these things during the work day and the bag simply sits under my desk, but I have to have them with me.

I accumulate so much crap in my life -- things I don't need and can't possibly use. I own more lipsticks, lip glosses, and lip balms than you will find in the entire cosmetics department at Nordstrom's. I mean, I buy, like, five of them per week. I buy pretty things like candles, blank notebooks, etc., and then decide they are too pretty for me to soil them by actually using them, so they sit, unused, all over my house. I have a room full of this crap. Shopping bags I've never even emptied. Clothes I don't wear. Candles I don't burn. Journals I don't write in. Make-up compacts I don't use. Pretty boxes of chocolate that I don't eat. Greeting cards I don't send. Fancy pens that I don't write with. As if actually enjoying any of these things would somehow be wrong. I can look, but I can't touch. I have email accounts full of filed mail that I don't reread, but can't delete. What the hell is wrong with me?

Well, I've entered sort of a purge mode lately. I'm doing my best to go through all of this accumulated crap, use what I can, and get rid of what I don't need. It's a painful process, and I don't know why. I only know that I want to be free of all of this baggage.