I don’t consider myself a hoarder or an unorganized person but sometimes I like to hang on to stuff because I think they have sentimental value or maybe someday I would show them to my kids and tell them about the stuff I use to do.

I have boxes and boxes of pictures, school calendars, little pieces of magazines with stuff I wanted to buy all stored in my closet, to the point that the bottom boxes are crumbling underneath all the weight of my memories and to make the matters worse I have no room left for my clothes anymore.

So today I said ENOUGH and I went through every single box, drawer, bag, binder and album and I threw away everything!!!! I figured, I don’t need a little piece of paper with little doodles on it about an ex boyfriend, or calendars that marked my exam days from 1999 to remind me of a failed mark I got on a calculus quiz or a reminder for a birthday of a friend I no longer keep in touch with. It’s a weird sensation to go through the stuff I gathered over the last 10 years and see how I’ve changed. I read through a diary I kept about a crush I had on a “hot hockey player” in my class, and I thought it was so funny and sad at the same time, he turned out to be a jerk and the diary ended up in the garbage.

The one thing I found that made me smile was the flower pin my prom date gave me on prom night. It’s nice and safe in a little box. I don’t even know what happened to my date. I fell out of touch with him. Oh well….

Another pastime of mine as a teenager was to cut out pages of fashion magazines and chop them up and make my own magazine out of them. I found a few

interesting articles and some odd trends between the mish mash of pages. Some of the pages were about up and coming actors, mostly male actors, and I found a piece on Ryan Reynolds in an issue of  InStyle magazine from 2002. He was only 25 then and so cute with his baby face.

So I leave you with that article….wish me luck on my cleanup and i hope I don’t regret throwing all my stuff away!

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