I recently started mentally preparing myself for my move to college. It all seems so exciting and new, like everything from here on out is an adventure. Even the mistakes I make are experiences for me to learn and to grow. One thing that hadn’t yet crossed my mind was emotionally preparing for college.
Assuming that the emotions and the nerves of my big expedition would start on move-in day, or, at the earliest, the week before moving in, it hit me by surprise when I realized growing up isn’t all adventure and new-beginnings. Transitioning into this chapter of my life would be difficult and emotionally demanding, as I have to grip onto my developing independence and slowly let go of my prized possession that is my childhood.
In mid-July, my mother suggested it was time to start tackling the biggest challenge in my household: cleaning my room. And it wasn’t just cleaning it either. It was sorting through everything in it and deciding what stays and what goes.
One of my life phrases is “messy mind, messy room,” and, being one who likes to keep busy, you can only imagine what my room looks like. This monster took my mother and me weeks to get through. Not to mention the fact that you have to figure out what you have to determine what you need, and, therefore, what goes on my dorm-shopping list.
As we started to sort through the many crooks and corners of my room, I started to realize that this room, even the messy parts, resembled such a huge part of me. Even my stuffed animals that stared blankly from a shelf, or my old childhood trinkets that were discovered while cleaning my closet. Everything had some sort of memory attached to it.
Going through those types of memories made me feel like Andy from Toy Story 3 when he puts all of his toys in the attic before moving out of his house. Each thing I grasped before giving it to the cardboard box had something very specific latched to it, explaining why I held on to it for so many years. Whether it be the sand-filled green lizard that my grandma sewed back together multiple times from its little limbs getting ripped, or the many “I Love You” stuffed dogs my parents got me for Valentine’s Day, or Patches that my friend and I won from a claw game and sent back and forth between our houses for months. These memories almost made the inanimate objects seem full of life, full of comfort, and full of love. Although it can be hard to give up those precious memories, the only thing that kept me moving through those moments and filling up those boxes was the hope of creating even more precious moments like these. In fact, I could be creating them with children of my own one-day.
Although stripping the photos off the walls and putting my dear memories into a box proved to be quite painful, I learned the memories of my childhood aren’t held within my stuffed animals or my photos. They are held in me and in the people I’ve shared them with. Giving my old trinkets away or throwing out old notes isn’t throwing away the memories I’ve made. The memories live within me. And even as a memory dies, more memories are born.
