discards

discards

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It has taken a lifetime to realize that you can discard the old versions of yourself, or at least the parts that no longer serve you. I lived for nearly half a century before this dawned on me, even though I had been throwing out the old, bringing in the new, and thriving on change all along.

I never realized fully what I was doing, but in counselling others to embrace change, I realize that so much of what stops them is the fear of becoming no one. Not just someone they no longer know as they cast off the past iterations but someone they are afraid they won’t be able to know, as though there is nothing to discover or do once they have said goodbye to the things that are no longer them.

I wonder about the elasticity of identity. It is not nearly as fixed as we imagine. It is important, but it is unstable.

shedding layers part six: nothing yet

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Good intentions, good intentions. I do need to discard more things but have not done much for a few days. Ideally the intent would be to discard one thing each day. But I have never been much of a hoarder/collector/keeper, so I don’t have a whole lot of things that I don’t use. I may move some furniture around, which will be a good time to go through things that are hidden away.

One of the big long-term plans is to renovate the house and surrounding buildings, which is undoubtedly a much bigger and more involved project than I can even imagine, especially because I don’t have much of an imagination at all when it comes to visualizing and conceptualizing space.

I’ve had some kind of eye discomfort/pain – I thought it was a stye so tried to self-treat but there was never any visible stye and eventually the discomfort got much worse. It seems to have been a tear duct blockage and possibly some kind of irritant got into my eye when I was driving with the windows open for many hours the other day (a lot of dust, dirt, etc. flying about). I suppose this has all been exacerbated by the fact that I spent so much of last weekend actually using the tear ducts – I guess I did shed something after all.

shedding layers part four

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My next discard is a boring, ugly dress. I will chuck it at the weekend. It has come to symbolize a lot of things, including moments of tremendous self-hate. It has come to remind me of many times I would rather forget. I never liked it in the first place but almost as if woven into the fabric, it’s just a sad rag clinging to who I don’t want to be. It’s going.