The Purge: Cleansing Old Wounds

Look, I’ll be straightforward here: I just put a little more than half the songs I wrote in middle school in the recycling, and I’m heartbroken. Songs and lyrics that, while not great or profound, I cherished so deeply all these years. Therapeutic diary entries about old crushes, friendships, and depression…all my feelings and thoughts boiled into three-ish verses and a chorus.

So why am I tossing them?

This morning, I sat down and read through them all, the melodies archived in my brain and the memories deeply rooted in who I became. I look over them whenever I move, to remind myself that I want to keep them, and up until now, they’ve been vital to my existence. But part of this bedroom purge is that I’m coming to terms with whether or not those memories are altogether good. I mean, yes, I wrote extensively about my depression and my friendship problems, which are not fabulous things to look back on, but so far, they’ve been a reminder of how far I’ve come.

Today I realized that most of those words born from hurt and pettiness don’t do anything for me anymore. I look at those lyrics, and I just feel icky. I read about friendships I fought so hard for that I don’t care about anymore, crushes I was too invested in the idea of rather than the person, and a life I so desperately wanted then that I’m glad I don’t have now. Those things were once so important to me, and for a long time, I knew I wanted to remember them. But really looking through those things now, I know that I don’t need the words (and bad rhymes) to tell me that Fourteen-Year-Old Me created Twenty-Five-Year-Old Me. I know that, and holding onto some documentation of who I was just isn’t helpful to me anymore.

Of course, I’m having reverse buyers remorse about it, but I carefully chose which songs and poems I kept. They’re the ones that make me smile. The few that are the needed reminders of specific ways I’ve changed. The ones that have some potential for a rewrite…

This big purge of my room has been very informative. Some of the things I’ve held onto for so long very clearly don’t matter to me anymore. I wonder where that switch in my brain came from. Some things, however, have been rather difficult to toss out. Cards from family members who have passed away. Pictures from moments I felt so loved (but with people I haven’t spoken to in years). Stories I wrote that heavily influenced my current style and subject matter. Almost two decades worth of musings from my adolescent brain. I’ve always seen my growth from my younger self to my current self as fairly linear. That you could y=mx+b that slope and come up with some consistent number. But it’s more like the concept of time in the afterlife as told by Ted Danson in The Good Place: The Jeremy Bearimy timeline.

Keeping certain things from my past just don’t make sense. I’ll always be adding to those pages and pages of emotional turmoil. I’ll always be documenting the highs and lows and in-betweens of my life, so I don’t need to hang onto words that didn’t quite get it right. Words that feel like lies and dramatics and were very clearly just my way of coping with a specific situation. But it doesn’t (really) matter what I wrote then, how iffy the melody was, or how juvenile the rhyming, because that’s still how I cope. I’ve learned that it’s not what I was writing but that I was writing at all, and it’s that skill that I’ll keep, hopefully, forever.

I’ve noticed on Booksta that a lot of us are ~going through it~ right now, and I’m not spared by this wave. It’s why it’s been either incredibly difficult or easy as pie to get rid of things in my room. My moods are either low or simply indifferent. I haven’t had many of those high days lately. I’m hoping that changes with the fast approaching Autumn season. I’m always more creative and productive when I can smell ghost stories in the air. But it doesn’t change that we’re all really just trying to focus on existing right now. And I know a lot of people are confronting those kinds of emotions for the first time, which can be terrifying. Hell, it’s pretty scary for people who know it well.

That’s kind of what I’ve been doing with this current phase of getting rid of my belongings: facing those feelings, old and new. Really acknowledging my growth and my shortcomings. Cringing at how much of a drama queen I was (and still might be). One of my favorite songs (“(Un)lost”) by one of my favorite bands (The Maine) has this line: “Control what you can, confront what you can’t.” It’s really ringing true right now, and it’s the mindset I’ve been trying to put myself in. This year has botched so many of our plans and thrown a wrench in our minds, but I refuse to waste this time. It’s easier said than done, of course, but I think it does come as simply as that lyric. Control what you can, confront what you can’t.

It’s certainly better than anything I’ve tried to write over the years.

But writing is the one thing that’s always been there for me, and it’s the one thing that I don’t think will ever change. That’s the only reason I feel like I’m finally ready to let go of these old lyrics. These words. I mean, I’m just going to write more anyway, so why not make a little room?