I’ve been working with a client who is writing her memoir, and it’s got me thinking about the things we keep and the things we discard as we move through the different seasons of our lives.

I have to confess this person astonishes me. She has kept everything—every photograph, every scrap of paper, every memento. She has her birth announcement. She has media from every workshop she attended, every concert she played (she was a professional musician), every person she met, every letter she received.

I look around my cottage and realize I’ve kept nearly nothing. Not “nothing” as compared to my client’s vast collection, but “nothing” as compared to what I imagine to be the standard person-going-through-life-accumulating-stuff. For me, some of it’s deliberate: there are events, situations, people I don’t really need to be reminded of, for good or ill. Some of it’s practical: leaving a large house and relocating to a small cottage is the best way ever to get rid of anything extraneous!

As I look at my own “long, strange trip” and the lives of others around me, what I observe is how much value—both materialistic and sentimental—we place on things. Western culture encourages that valuation: we’re constantly exposed to ads telling us what stuff will make our lives better, longer, happier. And if you discard that stuff? Does it mean you’ve turned your back on your aspirations?

The process of letting go of things, believes June Saruwatari, author of Beyond The Clutter, isn’t just about getting your desk and closet in order. It’s about relieving yourself of all the stuff you’re hanging onto from past careers, relationships, and unfinished business. “You hold onto things based on hope,” she writes. And looking around at what we choose to keep, it’s easy to see how. That too-small pair of jeans in the closet? You’re hoping to lose weight. That stack of magazines? You’re hoping to catch up on your reading. Those boxes of craft supplies? You’re hoping to finish a project you abandoned.

The trouble with that kind of hope is twofold: it generally doesn’t come to fruition, and when it doesn’t, you feel guilty about it. So then every time you look at those objects, you feel distress rather than pleasure. You beat yourself up about not having attained what you’d hoped for.

I live in a very small space, and it’s important to me that it be both functional and pleasant. When I walk in the door, I don’t want reminders of things I haven’t done or pieces of the past that disturb me to be my focus. Am I sweeping those issues under the rug, to stay with the same decluttering language? I don’t think so. I just think I’m not giving them pride of place. 

When my mother died, I felt I had to hang on to everything I had of hers. Notes. Clothing. Books. Mementos. Getting rid of anything at all brought on waves of guilt, as though I were somehow betraying her. Until I realized that it was her former possessions that were at the forefront of my mind, not her, her as a person, her as my mother. I’ve ended up keeping some of her things, but only what’s meaningful to me: a notebook of her poetry, the family heirloom clock, some wonderful photographs. I didn’t just lighten my space, I lightened my feelings as well.

I’m thinking about how this all applies to writing, too. I’m an editor as well as a writer, and a whole lot of editing involves decluttering so the meaning of the words can come through and not the words themselves. It’s the meaning that’s important, not keeping all the beautiful words we cherish. Remembering the writing admonition to “kill your darlings,” it seems to me that can be applied to all sorts of life situations.

Getting rid of what we don’t need, what we’ve outgrown, what is cluttering our minds and hearts as well as our homes and offices, means there is space to add different things and experiences and people. It can help us rewrite the story of who we are.

So—what about you? What do you keep? What do you get rid of? How do you draw the line? Feel free to use the comments field to share.