Bit By Bit
I have always been a collector.
Growing up, I would spend precious hours of vacation time at Lake Michigan scouring the sand for anything that was remotely eye-catching. When it was time to leave, I’d present my parents with a sand bucket filled to the brim with rocks and shells…and I’d be told I could pick out three to take home. I’m pretty sure I always managed to leave with more.
Back at my parent’s in Michigan, I still have dresser drawers solely dedicated to piles of notes and journals. Until my most recent trip home, this included an embarrassingly extensive collection of AIM messages from my manipulative middle school boyfriend.
I have boxes of doodles that I thought at some point I would turn into a full work of art. I’ve kept scrap paper that collected extra paint in abstract forms and fabric scraps that for years, I’ve intended to transform into the next fashion masterpiece.
This piece of my identity is one I am always at odds with, trying to reason with and change.
It was in my first years of college that I discovered the likes of Joseph Campbell, Pema Chodron, and Alan Watts. Spiritual inspirations whose teachings place an emphasis on the illusion of permanence or physical reality. Everything is changing. What you cling to that you think gives your identity some permanence is just an illusion.
These messages of simplicity and asceticism always echo some inner knowing, and every time I am confronted with this dilemma, I challenge myself to shed a little bit more. But it’s still a very emotion-based process.
When I embarked into the depths of those drawers of adolescence last August, I found a valuable exercise in this sort of release. Discarding the collection of dramatic interactions with boyfriend numero uno had hit a natural timeliness. It probably could have happened sooner had I been living at home, but it was also something that didn’t resolve itself in a year or even several.
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In fact, for being such an amateur relationship, it still took me well past my college years to fully accept and come to terms with the lasting effects that that relationship had on me. While I may have known intellectually that we were both just stupid, irresponsible teenagers that didn’t have the tools or emotional intelligence to treat a relationship properly (in addition to some mental health issues on his end), it took a lot longer to be okay with that. When I finally threw away reams of papers, I found myself reading the messages as an outsider, processing the words more objectively and feeling a completion in the understanding of both his part and my part in how things played out.
In a month, I will be moving. I’m only taking a short jaunt down the road, but it still means lugging everything I’ve deemed important to possess. I try to use these transitions as an opportunity to purge and evolve my minimalist aspirations and I’ve had almost a dozen of these chances since living in the Pacific Northwest. I’m still a far cry away from the likes of my aforementioned inspirations, but I’m definitely in a different spot than I used to be when it comes to my attachments.
As a photographer, I used to always set aside time to edit and organize every batch of photographs I took. Naturally, as the pace of life has become busier over the years and the advent of phone camera technology has produced an astronomical rate of material, I’ve become less compulsive about my organization practices. I also think this was indicative of the chaotic nature of my last relationship, where preserving and securing representations or memories of time sort of seemed to lose value.
But as is the natural way of my ADHD brain, my souring and sorting of physical belongings eventually led me down a rabbit-hole of pixelated possessions, weeding through hastily put together folders of files simply labeled ‘To Sort’.
Somehow in the slurry of uploads over the years, a saved voicemail recording ended up in a folder of unsorted items. It is the last access to his voice.
His voice used to mean so much to me. On road trips, we would sing in the car together. In deep conversations, I’d get enraptured with how his cadence changed and he’d dance with words more softly. I loved the way a giggle would infect the sound of his voice when he was gleeful or giddy.
But there were also moments his voice gave away a sense of insincerity. He knew how to be so connected to his emotions and yet it was so apparent when he was not. In the voicemail, I could hear this sort of forced empathy, like the message was more of a game or a step in a plan rather than a spontaneous heartfelt desire.
I could hear it too, when it had happened. The circumstance of that time are perhaps a story for another time. But even though I’d heard the disingenuous coloring over his words, I’d been so fixated on what I wanted from the relationship that I chose to ignore it.
Hearing it now, there’s a shift, and I can finally start facing the reality, but I don’t think I’m ready to delete it.
But I did throw away a t-shirt. So, we’re moving in the right direction.
