How to Let Go
- hailo
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Or, How to Clean Up Your Life
Every since I was a little girl, I have been a hoarder of memories. I've always treated my life like a really good meal that you want to savor. Saving the best part for last and being upset when it's all gone. Actually, always isn't a fair word. It's beautiful, but it's never true.
Last Friday, I had the honor of giving a talk at Sarah Lawrence. We sat in the Graduate building as I read them a letter a boy wrote to me at seventeen that I read whenever I'm having a tough time. I carry it around in my wallet and the folds have erased spots of ink on certain letters. Then I read them an essay I wrote in October called No More Drinking Alone. They asked questions about my writing style and treated me like a real writer, which is one of the many reasons I'm making a goal to finish writing American Princess Diet in March with the aim of finding a bigger publisher.
But at some point, as I talked with the students and they were struck by the letter (it's a really good letter) I began to question why I hold onto things like that. Because I had drawer full of letters before I moved. Letters from my Grandma. Friends. Even one or two from people who have broken my heart. Is something worth keeping, even if it's beautiful, if it makes you feel sad?
When I was young, my father would go on these business trips and come back with little trinkets from the world. A replica of the constitution. Air Craft Carrier shaped earrings. The sort of things you bring to show and tell. And I'd stuff all of my little trinkets in the bottom of my computer desk, the same place I'd sneak sugar packets during the summer as I watched Youtube videos until my parents found out and my brother laughed at me for years.
I always wanted life to be sweet, and I never wanted a good thing to end, the same reason why I can never make myself go to sleep, or I want to makeout with someone for hours with no destination.
When I moved into my apartment on the Lower East Side at 22, the first thing I did was fill it with books. A lot of authors I recognized and loved, before finding weird deep cuts on the discount shelves. I never even read half of them because I got busy writing and partying and reading things from the library, instead. I'm happy to name specifics now that I don't live there anymore.
Your environment matters a lot, you know? There's something called environmental psychology that explores how the space you're in shapes who you are and how you act. At one point in that room, I felt surrounded by my own heartbreak. The walls. Little trinkets. Last summer when things got bad, New York felt like a world of heartbreak memories. I think that's half the reason that I went to London for two months. To do karaoke in a room of stangers and be somewhere where I didn't have memories yet.
There was a lot of clutter in my life. Scraps of paper. Music, books, clothes I don't even like. You have to get rid of the clutter. Even Toni said:
If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
I got rid of over 34 books
there are not recommendations I have not read many of them
Lectures on Literature by Validmir Nabokov
Lectures on Literature by Validmir Nabokov (bigger and hardcover)
Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic by Mary V. Jackson
Chewing Gum: The Fortune of Taste by Michael Redclift
Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings by Louis H. Sullivan
Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life by Jane Jacobs
The Challenge of Christian Stewardship by Milo Kauffman
The Indie Author Guide by April L. Hamilton
Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler
My Mother Myself: The Daughters Search for Identity by Nancy Friday
Others Who Returned by H.R, Wakefield (glad to be rid of this one, I got haunted vibes from my copy)
The Insulted and Injured by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The March of Literature by Ford Madox Ford
Winter of our Discontent by John Steinbeck
Sunshine Sketches by Stephen Leacock
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich by Stephen Leacock
Parisian Nights by Guy de Maupassant
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism by Max Eastman
Queens Have Died Young and Fair by James Kirkup
Salambo by Gustave Flaubert
The Heir by Barbara Taylor Bradford
Rule Britannia by Daphne du Maurier
Ceremony of the Innocent by Taylor Caldwell
East of Eden by I.J. Singer
The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir
The Three Guardsmen by Alexander Dumas
Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich by Stephen Leacock (why I had two copies? no idea. I read one of his books last year and didn't love it)
Mastery by Robert Greene
Soldiers Pay by William Faulkner
Egon Schiele: Eros and Passion by Klaus Albrecht Schröder
Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Cousin Pons by Balzac
The Thirteen by Balzac
Cesar Birotteau by Balzac
I got rid of some clothes, some trinkets, I kept most of my pencils.
I tore up this beautiful letter from a man in London I once loved.
Sartre argues that we don't have a fixed self, but that "we create ourselves through our choices and actions." It's a liberating thought. That you can wake up one day and decide to move, to puruse a different career, to leave people who don't want you to be happy. You get to choose your environment, your future, and who you show up in the world as.
I think I hoarded so many memories as a little girl because I was afraid that they were all going to be taken from me, like a toy at daycare. But with each passing year, as I grow and work and continue to expand my faith in God and my own future, I know and trust that the best is yet to come.
xo
hailo
if you do this tag us in your essay I want to read ur writing! ^
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