There are two kinds of people in the world: those for whom stuff is, ultimately, just stuff, and those for whom stuff has an existential connection to who we are and the emotional world we inhabit.
I know there’s really a range, but the difference is real. When I was young, maybe four or five, a traveling exhibit of Lincoln memorabilia came to our local mall. I remember they had a plaster cast of his hands (which were huge). But what I couldn’t get over, what I kept coming back to for hours, was one of his hats and a pair of his glasses. These things he’d worn, touched, lived with, gave me literal chills. I couldn’t get over the reality that he’d slipped those glasses off before going to sleep at night. It felt so intimate to me, like these items were a kind of tesseract – a wrinkle in time – bringing Abraham Lincoln and me together across all those years.
To other (many other? most other?) people, those items were interesting artifacts, valuable curiosities. But for me, they had power.
It isn’t just about history. It’s in daily life, too.
A good friend and neighbor of mine once bought a new shower curtain. This is a thing we do on occasion, and not a particularly big thing. But her son, who was three or four at the time, cried brokenheartedly for the old one. He couldn’t remember their bathroom without it, and that shower curtain was part of what made life feel safe and known for him. She finally dug it back out of the trash and found a way for them to work through the transition (she’s an awesome mom).
Maybe there’s something of childhood to those kinds of connections – the favorite bear or perennial “security blanket” (I had both a super soft, threadbare blankie that went everywhere with me and an equally beloved, threadbare pink elephant named “Ellie”).
We grow out of those connections eventually, though maybe some of us more so – or differently – than others.
I’ve been wondering if some of those differences might be about an aspect of being an extrovert or an introvert – that aspect that relates less to our social proclivities and more to the way we process things.
My introverted friends process internally. They go inside themselves to think and feel before they’re ready to speak or write and engage the world. As an extrovert, I process externally. I often don’t know I knew something until the words come out. I engage the world, not because it tells me what to think, but so that I can discover what I think or feel.
Maybe that difference in processing things affects how we relate to the stuff around us, as well. Sometimes I feel like I live my life turned inside out – with the people and things around me shaping and being shaped by the cacophony that’s in my head. That feels like the opposite of how my introverted friends talk about experiencing the world, and I’m wondering if it may evoke or even require a different relationship with stuff.
On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, my happy, yellow Toyota was rear-ended by an impatient Tesla and totaled (thankfully, no one was injured!). When I bought her three years ago, she was the first new car I’d ever had. She named herself “Lucy,” and I loved that car. No matter how gray and dreary the morning, she was sunshine. And I need sunshine!
As I’ve navigated the whirlwind of insurance logistics and finding a new car (a new crimson Kia Niro hybrid is the one, it turned out), I’ve been missing Lucy. Beyond the needless loss of a good car, I miss her sunshine. She was both an expression of a big part of who I am, and something I could count on to brighten my day more consistently than the weather.
It’s never been easy for me to let go of stuff, though I’ve been learning. Losing my father at such an early age gave every thing I associated with him relational value, but I’ve been learning to invest that value differently. Like everything good, it can trap me – tangling me up and weighing my life down with the fear that every time I lose one of those things, I lose another bit of my father.
It’s easy for me to feel that way, but it’s not true.
In the past few years, I’ve been getting rid of stuff. Books, clothes, clutter, even keepsakes (who, indeed, am I keeping them for the sake of?). My life has more room to breathe, and it is still full of things that matter to me – things that both express who I am and shape who I am growing to be.
Happy, yellow Lucy is gone, but I know the part of me she expressed better now, and that’s not going anywhere. And I’ll learn the new car’s name (and pronouns) and what it was in me that made it feel like the right choice, and I’ll grow into that part of myself a little more.
The world changes, whether I want it to or not. And as much as learning and discovery is a part of who I am, the changes that come rearrange my life in ways I don’t always I like. But I think maybe I’m learning how to navigate those changes as myself, releasing what I don’t need to absorb and growing into aspects of who I am in fuller ways.
The stuff really is just stuff. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. For some of us, maybe that just means that, coming or going, it matter more.
Leaning Out 