Tossing Out My Old Life and Committing to the New

There are always seminal times in your life that you don't realize the importance of until much later. Today feels like it might be one of those days.

Today my husband and I are cleaning out our house and garage. A huge undertaking that makes me feel so much lighter for having done it. I'm scavenging all over the house, he's grabbing ten years of remodeling remnants. For instance, there's the carpeting and pad from the time we tore it all out of the downstairs and put in hardwoods. Some nasty old closet wood and some metal thing from when the furnace was replaced. We don't have a vehicle that will truck all this stuff away for us so it's all just sat, and accrued through the years in the house and in the garage.

So with half a week of vacation ahead of us we decided to get a dumpster and TOSS it all. And as we were tossing it all I started to dig a little deeper, past that couch we got when we were married, and the chair from the 70's his parents gave him for his first apartment. There deeper still, were my drawings and pastels from my college art classes. I've saved them all this time but for what? I'm never going to put nude sketches on my walls, just not my thing. But to see them again brought back memories of how cool and sophisticated I felt as an art student, drawing them.

Then there were the remnants of my past business lives. The things I did when I thought I really couldn't make it as an artist. Things like vases, floral spray paint, and other leftovers from my years as the owner of my own floral events business. Even before that there was the glassware I'd painted and tried to sell for a while in the mid '90's, my first attempt at a business. Then I found the the stamps left over from my decorative painting venture along with some small little bottles of dried up glaze. That was soo long ago.

For someone who saves EVERYTHING in the hopes I might find a use for it some day this really is hard. But I've saved so much over the years that my home is making me feel overwhelmed and anxious. There's no room for anything.

Disclaimer: I kept the bag of used up acrylic paint tubes though (I know- a weird thing to save- but I have this feeling I'll need them for a sculpture and it's not like I'll be able to source them again then)and some tin covers too. Explaining why I want to keep those to my husband's going to be a little tough so I stuck them behind something else. :)

All in all I've revisited an awful lot of my life today and I've realized a few things. By tossing out my floral trappings for good I'm acknowledging that the temporary hiatus I took from that business, after my son was born, is now permanent. I've left that phase of my life behind me and I'm glad because the place I'm going- where I'm committed to being the artist I always wanted to be, that's wonderful. Tossing out the old, embracing the new, it's a good thing.

So here's the question I have for you- what have you held onto out of a sense of fear that tossing it out would give you that freeing sensation? What pile of old whatever's really should get tossed? Is it photo's of an old relationship, trappings from a former existence, or paraphernalia from a past you need to move on from? Maybe clothes that are 3 sizes too large but you're afraid you really might gain that weight back again? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!!!