I love holding on to things. Over the years, I have meticulously stuffed a little piece of every memory into what I call a treasure box, a neat 5 by 4 inches, that I begged my parents to buy me on my tenth birthday. I had decided, at that young age, that I would hold on to everything. And I did. The ticket from my first trip abroad, my school IDs, birthday cards, holiday cards, friendship bands have all made its way to the box. When the box started overflowing, I reorganized a few things and cleared up a shelf of my cupboard. I was a little crunched for space, but we were good. Then, teenage hit. Nostalgia and angst spiked, aspirations and ambitions grew. I couldn’t fit them into a box, or even a shelf. An old, battered guitar that I still nurse dreams of learning to play, a small red chair, a childhood favorite, that could no longer stand my weight (it was buckling as is), several bundles of old magazines that I have been planning to read for years now. In short, my room and later my home became a treasure box, haunted always by the ghosts of past hobbies, missed chances, and memory spirals. Some people admired my resolve to be the keeper of all things; others asked me what the point was. Through it all, I would always smile and say, “That’s just me.” Like it was an imperfect trait I had learned to embrace.  

Until I accidentally slipped down a YouTube rabbit hole recently. Despite the hoarder that I am, I have always been pretty organized. Every once in a while, I take immense pleasure in pulling all my stuff out and reorganizing them. So, quite predictably, organizing videos take up good space on my Instagram and YouTube feeds. But this time, I went searching for it. I had been away for my Masters for two years and was moving back home to start a new job. I needed a new beginning, in every way. And typical of me, that started with reorganizing and redecorating my space. But two years away from home meant I had made so many memories. Not content with them staying in my head, I had lugged trinkets, small and huge, back home to store. Only this time, I was in for a challenge. However I tried organizing, it just didn’t seem to work. My cupboard, my wardrobe, my shelf, my room seemed ready to burst at the slightest trigger. So, my YouTube search was simple – organization hacks that would allow me to keep everything in order. To keep everything in order. A portal opened up. And I stepped in, not knowing I’d come back fully changed at the other end.  

A few videos in, I realized that they all began with the same step – decluttering. A distasteful word for a memory hoarder like me. But I had already thrown away, with a slight unease, a few torn clothes, broken slippers and some old stationery (pens that didn’t work, blackened erasers, the obvious stuff) and thought I was done. Surely, I don’t have any more clutter! But when the YouTube gurus started defining clutter, I was flabbergasted. What do you mean “things I hadn’t used in the last one year”, “things that do not spark joy”, “things I didn’t know existed”, and “things that do not serve my present self” are all clutter? I understood but refused to acknowledge that about 80% of my stuff would make the cut here. Instead, like all genuine hoarders, I defended my stuff to myself. I outright refused to buy into the idea that getting rid of my things would benefit me. It was after all, my things. Okay, maybe they weren’t too useful, and some of them did bring back bad memories and negative feelings, but isn’t embracing all of that what life is about? I didn’t need more decluttering videos to tell me what I didn’t want to hear.  

A month or so went by. I started my new job. Life was moving ahead. I didn’t have enough time to spare and abandoned the decluttering project. But the videos kept resurfacing. And I kept watching, with no plans to act. Until one day, just like that, I caught myself thinking, “maybe stuff is just stuff”. (Influencers are called so for good reason, I suppose!) I slowly began to see, and see clearly.  

Prepared to fail, I attempted another decluttering project. But this time, I was using a slightly different brain, its hard-wired beliefs had come undone a little, and it seemed to look at everything I held in a different light.  

The extra cables and cords that I haven’t had the need to untangle in the last five years might perhaps never come in handy? 

Warranty cards past their warranty dates, user manuals I have never flipped through, magazines which if I read now would give me such outdated information it’d be outrageous…surely these could be gotten rid of?  

Clothes that didn’t fit any more, the soft toys my now 10-year-old cousin used to play with as a baby….and several other such items finally made their way to garbage bags and donation boxes (after several back and forths, of course. Learning to let go takes practice.) 

Then came the “treasures”.  

I am not going to lie, it wasn’t easy. No number of decluttering videos will prepare you enough to face the emotional roller-coaster that decluttering your stuff is. Stuff you had always thought was important, necessary even, but stuff that you begin to realize you are better off without.  

A broken toy, that I have never really loved, but had saved only because I had managed to save it for some fifteen years, needn’t be called a treasure perhaps? 

If a ragged t-shirt that was my comfort wear when I was 15 was called treasure, then surely anything could be treasure.  

Extra boxes, craft supplies, dried up paints, gift wrappers all collected for creative projects I realized I’d never get around to.  

A keyboard that my friend bestowed on me years back when she moved abroad because I had shown interest in learning to play it. But I let myself face it, I was never going to play it. It would be better off being with someone else who would.  

I even decluttered my treasure box (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write). I tried to recall why I had saved each of the items and if I couldn’t remember or if they brought back memories that weighed me down, I let them go. Many things stayed. For instance, I saved handwritten cards, riddled with spellings and blotted with ink. I saw them as little pieces of the people I love. Now those, I decided, were important enough to me to be labelled a treasure.  

I decided to give my guitar dreams a last chance too. I worked up an ultimatum for myself – if I didn’t take the initiative to start learning in a month, it would have to go too. I have already started strumming the strings every day, and it gives me so much joy.  

It was a month of sighs and tears as I gently bid goodbye to certain versions of myself that I had held on to for too long. The wisdom I earned helped me realize that life lies ahead of me, long and exciting, hopefully. There’s going to be many more memories and even more things to treasure, which will, from now on, be more carefully picked. And for that, I needed to make space, not just on my shelves, but also on my mind. To let go, say the YouTube gurus I thank, is also to make space for new things in life. 

Of course, I am still a keeper of things. But not all things. Because keeping all of it would make none of them special. There’s joy to be had in keeping things. And peace to be had from letting go of them when it’s time. Because in the end, isn’t that what life’s all about?