tips on getting rid of stuff...

Been meaning to link to this on Nat's blog for a couple of weeks but not got round to it.... better late than never:

"Go to your wardrobe, look at everything and think about how likey is it that you will wear this or that. I did this and was left with not much! True, a lot of stuff were nice dresses that you only wear to parties etc, but those I kept. I threw away my diaries, the hardest one to get rid of was the one from the time I used to know P.D + C. Barat, not because of them but because it was my first year in the Uk and I had no clue. It was just months before I met K. I realise now that all these things I've been hanging on to are just things, that the memories still prevail and that I a not evil just because I don't want them around anymore. Like- I kept my orange juicer for ages after it was broken, just because K. had given it to me- How dumb is that?"

I've been trying to rationalise my possessions too, but am much less efficient than Natalia, clearly. My problem isn't clothes, or even books, or CDs, it's the closest thing I have to diaries - which is just reams and reams of paper, letters, cuttings, notebooks, pages torn from magazines, drawings I've collected, photos. I have a little filing cabinet in the corner of my room which really should serve my purposes perfectly, but instead I've got something like three massive boxes of unfiled litter. Unlike Nat, who is braver than me I think, I can't chuck all the scraps out - worse, I can't even go through them without getting massively diverted and upset and embarrased and amused and without creating a ton more mess in the process. Should I just junk them? No, I can't do that. Instead, I think I'll just keep on accumulating stuff, and hope Nat's blog throws up more clues further down the line...

And I should get a shredder!