Hi, there! Sorry I have been away for a while. As I talked about in my last post, I was on the verge of graduation, so I spent the first week studying for finals and the second week moving out and saying goodbye to everyone and everything in East Lansing. It was really, really tough, but hey, in the words of the wise Winnie The Pooh, “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” Graduation was beautiful, and as always, I am so proud to be a Michigan State Spartan (alumnus).

Now that I am home in Chicago suburbia, I have spent the last week going through every nook and cranny of my bedroom. Since I now have all of my stuff home from college (And I have a lot of stuff… like, so much stuff), I can’t rely on a storage unit to hold half of it during the summer. So my mom basically told me I have to find a place for all of it (minus the furniture) in my bedroom, or it’s going out with the trash on Friday.

Now, I’m one of those people who occasionally enjoys cleaning. I really like organizing and having a tidy kitchen and bedroom and whatnot, but going through things that I have had my whole life and deciding what to say goodbye to? That’s not the style of cleaning I am referring to here.

If you couldn’t tell from my last post, I can get really attached to things. It’s exactly the reason my parents only let me play with a puppy once at a Petland store when I was little. The first time they brought a puppy into the playpen, I was so sad that I couldn’t keep her that I almost cried on the way home, even though I knew full well from the start that we were not actually getting a puppy. Fast forward to 22 year old me and I will be the first to admit that I still have a tough time letting go (shocker!).

Now that I’m finally donating a lot of things I’ve had since I was a kid though, I’ve gotta say, my childhood ROCKED! 2 gallon bags of Barbie clothes, a Barbie horse farm, slap bracelets, poppers, a thousand stuffed animals, arts and crafts, Tae Kwon Do stuff, figure skating dresses, Spice Girl dolls, animal books… and that’s not even half of the fantastic array of randomness that I collected as a child. Like, wow. My childhood was amazing!

But within all of the things that meant so much to me growing up, one of the greatest that I rediscovered were the few letters and cards that I saved from friends and family. At the time, these people were really important to me in some way. The coolest part? EVERY note I saved is from a person I’m still close to today. It’s like I knew who was going to be important to me as I moved into my future. I knew who were going to be my true friends through it all. Man, am I a lucky girl.

So, maybe you don’t get as attached to things as I do. Maybe you do. Either way, sometimes you will have to do things you don’t want to do because they’re tedious, boring, and time consuming. But there can be a lot of fun in the process! It’s hard donating things that meant a lot to you and that still conjure up wonderful memories to this day, but it’s also very rewarding to take that walk down memory lane and then pass those items on to someone else, so that they can make their own wonderful memories too. Remember that there can be some good in goodbye.

Have a lovely day.