Decluttering Mentally and Emotionally
On Finally Tossing Out Praise and Criticism from Three Decades Ago
This purge was WAY overdue!
Today, I went through a five-pound stack of papers that had been occupying my office desk drawer, untouched, for a solid decade. Prior to that, they occupied my life, untouched, since 1991.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching Marie Kondo shows lately, but I had a strong urge to declutter — and to ask whether the things I’ve kept truly “spark joy” as she puts it. Turns out many of them do not.
While pursuing an MFA at George Mason University in Virginia (an awful story), I was made to participate in a “thesis roundtable.” Only, I was a first-year and had no thesis. (Chalk that class assignment up to the infinite wisdom of university administrators.)
Anyway, I assembled 20-odd poems and eventually got my turn in the hot seat. The pile of papers mentioned above was the stack of my marked-up manuscripts I received back from everyone — three decades ago! I’d kept them all this time because I always figured I’d return to those poems and revise them someday, taking the valuable feedback into account.
Flipping through them, though, I found little of much value at all — just the three-decade-old, often rushed, and not…
