A few days after Thanksgiving this year, I found myself at a self-storage facility in Virginia to collect the remnants of my childhood. My things had been neatly packed by my parents before leaving the state after living there for 20ish years and heading south for Florida (as the Boomers do). Cleaning out this storage unit had been on my to-do list for over two years and I felt ready and anxious to finally be crossing both an emotional and logistically daunting task off the list.
The weather was gray and rainy and there was absolutely no one else at the storage facility. I was thankful that the universe had matched the mixed emotions running through my body and that I’d been gifted a semblance of privacy to deal with my belongings.
Back in 2018 when my parents got serious about selling their house and relocating, I went down to Virginia and spent hours sorting through my things, making piles of what to donate and what to keep. Bill made himself at home on the bed in my high school bedroom and I sat on the floor of my walk in closet, overwhelmed. There were memorabilia from college - cups I had stolen from the dining hall, way too many college t-shirts, and every planner I ever had with notes and reminders of a busy and full life. There were notebooks from high school, prom dresses, photo albums, and tchotchkes that at one time I felt like I needed to have forever. The thought of having to actually make space for these things in my current New York adult life didn’t seem realistic.
A box in my closet had a set of porcelain dishes that were manufactured down the street from my family’s house when we lived in Germany in the early 90’s. These dishes came with us to Hawaii, Nebraska, Virginia, and then eventually with me to college when I moved into a house with 7 girls off campus. Rediscovering them again 10 years later I was overcome with the emotional weight that these dishes held and their place in the story of my life. I held the dishes in my hands and just started sobbing, probably one of the first times I ever cried in front of Bill. A little caught off guard that I was crying over what looked like a simple set of dishes, Bill asked me what was wrong. With tears running down my face and choppy speech, I tried to explain that I had no room in our apartment for these dishes, but that I couldn’t fathom just letting them go - their meaning was too heavy. Like the rational person he is, Bill heard me out, watched me cry about dishes, and thoughtfully said, “Well, how about you just pick a piece or two to keep?” To this day we have two white porcelain mixing bowls with tiny blue flowers around their rim that sit nested in our cabinets and Bill refuses to touch them. “I know how much they mean to you and I can’t risk breaking them.”
For the past 3 weeks, the contents of my storage unit has held one of the rooms in our apartment hostage. 7 heavy boxes, 2 turkish rugs, and 2 pieces of furniture that my grandfather made for me as a kid ensured that no one could walk into this room. This week, I finally had the energy to deal with them. I pulled up a chair, started cutting into boxes, and pulled out long lost treasures - a few I’ll share below.
At first I tried to reconcile every artifact’s meaning and purpose in my current life, and be really judicious about chucking things that didn’t serve me in the present moment. A few things were easy: My and my sister’s American Girl Dolls and their outfits are going straight to ebay, my college yearbooks (totally not as meaningful as my high school ones), and tons of papers, flyers, cards, etc. that no longer carried any emotional value. The initial purging part was surprisingly easier than I expected.
Rationalizing why I was keeping some things, on the other hand, was a lot harder. If I’m going to keep this thing only to keep it in a box or tucked away, why keep it at all? I ruminated on this for a while and something I found in one of my boxes helped me see things a little less rigidly. I had tons of school papers and worksheets in one of my boxes and one assignment from elementary school was to describe, “A Museum of You.” We were instructed to describe what each floor of our museum would say about ourselves and what personal effects would would be on display. That was a light bulb moment for me when I thought about it in my current context: Museum don’t have have their whole collections on display year round and I don’t have to either. Frankly, I don’t have the space to. That might change in the future, but for now, I’m resting easy knowing that the pieces and things I decide to keep mean something to me and say something about who I was years ago and who I am now.
Here’s a few of those gems, in truly no particular order:
I studied Music Business in college and since I knew I wasn’t a good singer, I wanted to be an artist manager. In the summer of 2004 between high school and college I was on the street team for Live Nation, which meant I got to go to concerts for free if I passed out flyers. In Summer of 2007 I interned in New York City as an A&R and Promotions intern at Universal. In 2008, I became an official coordinator for Live Nation where I read riders and sent checks of hundreds of thousands of dollars to artists. I saw Brett Michaels and Barack Obama at our venue (unfortunately, not at the same time).
After I interned at Universal, I became known as “the girl who got to intern in NYC at a record label” back at college The school magazine did an article on me and made me do this ridiculous photo shoot where I threw envelopes at the camera because I got my internship by telling one of our guest speakers in my music program that I’d lick one thousand envelops a day and work in the mailroom just for a chance to be an intern. It worked and I never had to work in the mailroom.
A box full of notes from high school and middles school. Mostly between boyfriends and best friends. So much young and sweet naivety.
My first piggy bank. To this day I can remember what it feels like to wedge dollar bills and coins in and out of it. Babysitting and birthday card money from grandparents kept this baby full.
One of the boxes I unpacked was filled with a few pieces of dishware made in Bruchmühlbach, the German town I lived in growing up. Yes, the same factory that made the dish set I was crying about up above. There’s something about these pieces that remind me of childhood delight and I think I want to get it framed.
My Brownie Girl Scout sash from my troop in Germany. I love how we were called the "lone troops overseas". It kind of gives me Troop Beverly Hills vibes. Also love these location specific patches - if Germany meant anything to me, it meant lots of castles.
My need for approval for following the rules is deep-seeded. For at least 30 years I’ve been striving for validation to be a good kid, apparently.
When I lived in Germany, I was quite young, but we had good family friends who had kids in high school. I think we went to their high school orientation for some reason and they made me and my sister high school ID cards even though we were in 1st grade. I remember LOVING this thing. Here’s my actual high school ID card.
This is the first cell phone I ever owned at 17 and I had to share it with my twin sister. We switched off days of who got to hold it in their backpack and carry it around. To this day, this number is still my phone number.
When I was learning to swim in Germany, I was 6 or 7 years old and my teacher terrorized me on the last day. The final “test” was to dive to the bottom of a 12 foot pool and grab a ring and bring it to the surface. I was so so so so scared to do it, but she told me she’d do the dive with me. I threw the ring, jumped into the pool and stared swimming towards the floor of the pool. I panicked half-way through and started swimming back to the surface and when my swim teacher realized what I was doing, she put her hand on my back and pushed my little body to the bottom of the pool. I grabbed the ring and swam to the top of the pool as fast as I could and broke into tears the minute my head came through the surface of the water.
The grasp that The Sound of Music movie and soundtrack had on my 8 year old self was strong. I could likely sing the whole movie from memory to this day.
So many important things going on here: Formative literature for when I got glasses at 4 years old, every pair of childhood glasses that I owned and some of their cool early 90's cases, and the eye patch I had to wear to train my weaker eye. My parents made getting glasses a big fun to do - there was cake! New glasses every year! And it was a big part of my personality: We always told people that they could tell me and my twin sister apart because I wore glasses and there was a "g" in my name. 🤓
I used to live and die by my planners in college. Now my life isn’t so busy and Google Calendar exists, but it’s fun to look back at everything that was going on in a random month my freshman year.
I found this note book one of my boxes with goals for my sophomore year of high school. I have NO idea why I wanted to wear a skirt or dress at least once a week, but I can tell you, I almost wore one every day that whole year.
If you haven’t guessed already, I was an overachieving nerd in high school. I lettered in academics, choir, drama, and sports management (I didn’t make the volleyball team but I ended up managing it). In the photo, I'm a senior and I'm with the "Power Team" (one of my goals from Sophomore year), which was basically like DARE and Improv. We'd go to elementary schools that fed into our high school and talk to fifth graders about peer pressure and staying away from drugs. Was I practically a cop?
Italian Lire and German Deutsch Marks from before the Euro was a thing. Collected during my family’s time and travels abroad when we lived in Germany.
This bowling scorecard has to be from me and my sister’s 5th or 6th birthday party. I texted my sister a picture of this yesterday and told her, “Look at your score, we HAD to be using bumpers.” She’s always been a better bowler than me though.
In high school I took photo class two years in a row and it was my absolute favorite. I don’t think that I was “technically” good at photography, especially when it came to manually developing photos in the dark room (but my dear friend Emma is so beautiful here it doesn’t matter that my contrast is way off). My art teacher Mrs. Staples was the coolest, chillest art teacher ever and she had gone to the college that I was going to. She was vibes and made everyone feel like an artist.
For some reason I needed to keep this copy of my PSAT, if only to remind myself that 20 years later, math at this level is not important and I don’t need to stress about it.
My great-grandmother made everyone in the family mittens every year for Christmas. I kept 5 pairs because they’re all so fun and beautiful. Some are super tiny and remind me of having fun in the snow as a kid
I worked on campus all four years of college and I was a tour guide. I got paid $6.50 to work at the welcome center where my job was to give visitors maps, parking passes and man the campus AIM account, JMUJOEINFO, where you had to answer random questions from students (usually asking for the dining hall menus). I also worked at our student union, which had pool tables, open mics, a coffee shop and places to just chill. It was definitely an easy job, my boss was an amazing hippie lady, and all my friends came and hung out with me when I worked.
Thanks for joining me on this little trip down memory lane. I hope there are objects in you life that bring you as much joy as my newly rediscovered ones have.
