Why Did I Save That?

gratuitous shot of one o' my zinnias

Have you visited the 100 Things 100 Days blog? I love it, and am also completely jealous of Christine's ability to make each clutter clearing post entertaining. That is a gift! Then there's the fact that she counts each piece of clutter. I wish I'd done that and kept track of exactly how many items I've purged, though I doubt I'd ever make it to 10,000 even if I counted every single piece of paper purged. I tried to track this with the dearly decluttered list, but alas I lost the motivation to update it.

I keep trying to do what to me is a massive purge of 100 items in a single day, but find it pretty much impossible. Unless I attack two categories of my items that are still rather massive: paper and photos. So Sunday, after spending a few days away, I came home and did exactly that.

One area I've had a major breakthrough this year is sentimental clutter. I used to save every scrap of paper that reminded me of big trips, major milestones, etc. I had dozens of letters received while I was an exchange student, many of whom from my fellow exchange student friends I haven't spoken to since. When I read them again, which was rather boring, I couldn't remember why I'd ever kept them in the first place.

And photos, oh the photos. I used to keep two shoeboxes crammed full of extra photos in addition to the photo albums full, now I'm down to less than one shoebox, and I even decluttered one of the albums. It wasn't painful at all to toss the duplicates, the poor-quality shots, and the shots of people/places I don't feel the need to keep forever. Photos I wanted to keep but didn't necessarily need in paper form have been scanned before tossing.

Here's what I decluttered Sunday evening:

• 40 letters from my exchange student days eons ago
• 9 cards
• 87 photos
• 1 red plastic notebook which housed said letters