I’ve never had a good memory and I’ve never had a huge attachment to places. But if I have a token of a place or a photo of a time, then I’m able to remember the event more clearly. I collect things from important people and places I go and I’ve become very sentimental.
I have boxes of things I’ve acquired over the years. Diaries, cards, ticket stubs, birthday presents that came from people who I left in the past, a lot of bad poetry from high school. I have a hard time throwing those things away because they are probably the only things that will trigger those memories for me.
I went through some of the boxes recently and could only throw away a few things. Diaries that mostly only spoke about how my family were jerks and how I was fat, photos of people who left me with bad feelings, and trinkets that I couldn’t find an attachment to.
But there’s so much left and the problem with being sentimental isn’t that I’m going to become a hoarder one day. The problem is that these things make me miss people who have hurt me, who I don’t even like anymore. They make me miss times that I was actually miserable during. But by being so sentimental, it’s easy to forget the bad. Even when they are things that should be long gone.
It’s hard to be so sentimental, I feel oddly attached to dumb things and then feel like reaching out to people who stopped caring about me altogether. It’s a dangerous road and I’ve found it best to just keep those boxes closed.
