Losing It

Ten years ago, when I was getting ready to move out of my first Real Apartment, the receptionist at the office's front desk gave me the wrong move-out date. My roommates and I made careful plans to stretch the moving out over a week so it wasn't a huge rush, but the morning after we moved all the large furniture, we returned to the apartment to find "cleaners" throwing all our things into trash bags.

On some level, I don't think I've ever really dealt with that. I lost most of my comic book collection, and it was years before I started following anything regularly again. I'm sure there are photos, art, all kinds of irreplaceable things that went. And yeah, I couldn't tell you what most of them were, but that's not the point.

Since then, I declutter as a way to feel like I have control, since I know how easily I could lose it.

Today I took a pretty big leap of faith. Most of the random things in our apartment are going to charity before we move. My girlfriend found a place that'll come by and pick it all up, and they're coming today.

While I'm at work.

Yeah, I sorted it all ahead of time and put the things I'm keeping in the other room. She asked me about all sorts of individual things. She's actually been very, very patient about my anxiety.

But ultimately when the charity truck comes, she's the one directing it and I'm out here, in the office. I have to trust her. And I have to remember that for all the anxiety and for the comics that I do miss having available, the vast majority of the stuff that disappeared from that apartment, I really haven't missed.

It's not the stuff that got to me, it was the loss. And it's time to get over that too.