Stuff.

It’s the wonderfully generic term we give to items we have a hard time classifying. Understanding why we hold onto it is one of the unsolved mysteries of the universe. I’ve gone through purges before, so I know what I’m doing, I just don’t understand how I keep ending up in the same place.

When I was 23, I sold or gave away almost everything I owned. My older friends thought I was suicidal, and looking back with a few years under my belt now, I can see why. My books all went to the local library, I sold off my VHS and CD collection, and I left town on a 2 month road trip with only a car, camera and some clothes. It was freeing and terrifying all at once.

While I’m not quite at that level of dematerialization today, I’m definitely in a purging phase again 20 years later. In the last 24 hours, I have vacated two separate storage spaces, places we were spending a combined $300 each month to store “stuff”.

It’s liberating.

You don’t ever really own stuff. It owns you. And you can’t take any of it with you anyway. As a mortician friend of mine once said, “Ever seen a Uhaul at a funeral?” We often pay to hold onto things which hold us down, steal our resources, and cost us money we could use for more rewarding adventures. Even when you get free stuff, if you pay $300 a month to store it for 2 years, your free stuff just cost you $7,200.

That was the calculus rattling in my head. Like a mantra, the question repeated: “Why am I paying for this?” Well, the short answer is, I’m not anymore.

And I’m just getting started.

— The Impostor