Back in the Saddle: Thoughts on Moving
"Where have I been?", you might ask. Well, it's not as if I haven't been around. But I've just been busy doing other things for a long time. My life has totally changed since the last time I wrote something here. Dating a different woman, just moved out of the old apartment into a back room of my office.
A bit of downsizing there due to the economy, I'm afraid to say. There have been lots of dreams since then for sure, though I haven't the time to post them to the site. Mostly they were about fears — as dreams often are — or about flying. I tend to have those a lot. I also have dreams where I'm living in cluttered environments.
It's an odd thing living in your office. Kind of stigmatizing. When I told my friends what I was about to do, they looked at me with concerned expressions. Nodding eventually at the sense of it, since it is always good to save money. But I ought to have been able to make enough money to keep the old place, and I ought to have stayed on top of things better to hustle a bit more, make more money, and make sure that things didn't come to this.
So here I am, 98% out of the old place. Done with cleaning the interior space and am now working on the basement and outside storage spaces. I'll have it all wrapped up by end of day tomorrow. It's amazing how much stuff I've accumulated since I moved there in 2003. Actually, I've been transporting lots of things from house to house over the years.With each move I've dealt with more and more of the lingering possessions and paperwork that seems to have been hard to get rid of in one fell swoop.
I filled up an entire 10' x 10' storage area with furniture and boxes, and then brought everything else that I couldn't part with just yet, to the office. The experience has left me numb. After a certain point during the moving process, you just have to move at a constant pace picking things up and deciding what to do with it and then executing on the decision. Very little time can be spent —unless you have it — thinking about things. "Do I really need it?" "Is it worth anything, can I sell it?" Parting with things of value is difficult for me.
In all fairness to myself, I have done the best that I can to throw stuff out. And it has been a tremendously cathartic process to sort through things, recall the memories associated with them, and them toss them out. I had stuff from my high school years. Photos, paperwork. Sheesh! Why did I hang on to this things for so long?
But as I said, I feel myself healing from past hurts. It feels good, lighter now.
Once I'm done with the old place, I'll have to deal with getting organized in the new, smaller space. There are boxes and bags everywhere in the office now. I've become like those hoarders whose homes are so crowded that they only have a narrow pathway to walk from the front door to the bathroom. This is really depressing for me sometimes. My therapist said that if I feel sad, I should say this new mantra, "this is only temporary, I know what my goals are".
That's just it, I moved because I had accumulated enough debt to sink me financially. It couldn't go on like that. I had to take action to stop the bleeding. Sad as it is, I'm starting to feel relieved about not having the burden of that large rent hanging over my head.
