Is The World Falling Apart??? Or Am I Collapsing the Universe??? Part 3: Spring Cleaning

So I was planning to do some serious spring cleaning this month. (It is May.) Rather than my usual bi-annual seasonal clothing switch-over around each equinox, I plotted a thorough purge of the flotsam and jetsam polluting my closets and my life. Yes, trashing the detritus of my past taking up space in my personal space would feel oh so good. Making room for something, anything! would feel oh so satisfying. Welcoming the new, even if it was old (as in antique!) would feel oh so rewarding. But somehow I got waylayed.

Each time I allotted time - a few hours, an afternoon - to going in and taking action, I didn't. I'd open the door, peruse the situation, pull out a few hangers - and abandon my mission. I'd toss the hanger on the bench, over a chair. Or I'd drop them just let them drop to the floor. And leave them where they lie, stepping over them for days ...

What's this? Procrastination? Existential angst? Another mid-life crisis? Just plain laziness? Sure, I can blame it on the wet and freezing weather. I mean, who wants to do spring cleaning when, despite the calendar, spring remains elusive? I can blame it on the state of the world. I mean, how can I focus on petty things like closets when it feels like the End of Days has come ahead of its December 2012 scheduled arrival? I mean, can our negligence and ineptitude and plain old greed make an even bigger mess of things? What with entire countries going bankrupt, while entire continents and our own economy may still go belly up ... wars never ending ... terror attempts failing and succeeding here, there and everywhere ... attacks on schoolchildren in classrooms??? With our constant rape and pillage of Mother Earth - crude oil spilling unchecked ... the earth warming and the glaciers melting and the waters rising ... the blue Pacific turning into a stagnant Sargasso Sea of plastic waste ... football field-sized parcels of rain forests and wetlands disappearing by the day - death by a thousand cuts, ugly and grueling and slow. Mother Nature, pissed as hell, refuses to be bested; she continues to let Iceland spew its volcanic ash over Europe and the Atlantic, shake up a different corner of the globe as soon as the headlines on the last quake recede ... Indeed things seem to be cracking apart at the seams every which way.

We won't even get into my personal life. Forget the closets - I can barely blog with all the horror!

That was fun. Now, what's really keeping me from my "out with the old" mission, from clearing musty, dusty clutter to make room for something new and exciting? From whence springs my malaise? On the one hand, I'd really like to chuck all or most of this crap and start over. Completely. From scratch. New furniture. New apartment. New city, perhaps! New people, even! On the other hand, the thought of letting go of this stuff, the energy encased in it, the memories unleashed by it, the milestone of life symbolized within it, scares the hell out of me.

It's as if throwing out this stuff equals throwing out a life. My life. Me. My identity. Myself. Who I think I am, who I think others think I am, who I'd like others to think I am. It's all I've got in this world. ("... in this world" - we'll come back to that.) And God know, even though I haven't touched 90% of it since 1989, I may one day need this stuff! I remember throwng away a hideous leopard print nightgown, only to find myself searching for it later to use in a scene in acting class. You never know.

I tell you, the resistance I encountered when I attempted this month to go through things, especially clothing in my closet that I haven't worn in decades, alarmed me. I ran through the gamut of negative emotions: disappointment ("I'll never be young/thin enough to wear this ever again!"); fear ("But what if I need it one day and don't have it anymore?"); sadness (I wore this to my father's funeral"); bewilderment ("Why on earth am I holding on to this rag?"); anger ("Can't believe I stayed with that idiot for another 6 months after he gave me this piece of shit for Christmas"), punctuated here and there with a pleasant surprise or lovely warm memory. For example: my taste, which has changed dramatically (for the better!) over the years. My years living abroad. My unconventional educational and professional trajectory. My family, nieces and nephew; memories of a wonderful father and dear grandparents. My amazing friends. The handful of wonderful men who might have become my husband. Taking stock. Assessing a life. Guess that's what one does when one approaches a milestone ...

Getting ride of these clothes and other souvenirs from the past, it almost feels like a shedding of skin. A peeling away of the old surface, a throwing off of a false and faded relic to reveal a newer, truer self. (Interestingly, this also occurred on a physical level. It's as if my body, in solidarity, conspired to rid itself of internal muck an mire. Only it chose to use my face as its trash can. Perhaps in an attempt to slough away that which no longer served, to expulse the toxins or junk gunking up the system, for an entire week my skin went through its own series of volcanic eruptions. Pretty. Then the welts retreated as quickly and completely as they appeared. Thank God.) What's left feels new and improved. The butterfly emerging from the cocoon? Not exactly. Different, yet the same. More fully formed. Evolved, maintaining the best of the past to help create the updated model: TQ Version 5.0.

And what's old and in the way for me could be new and enthralling for someone else ...

Forgive me - this isn't the direction I intended this blog to take. All very interesting, but what does it have to do with collapsing the universe? I'll let you know next time; it will probably involve "all I have in this world"; operative words being "in this world" ... but now I have closets to clean -

© 2010 Theresa Quadrozzi