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How I Lost Myself

I sold the condo I owned for ten years the same week I had open-heart surgery.

It wasn’t great timing.

In the weeks leading up to these two huge, simultaneous events in the fall of 2016, friends and family volunteered their time to pack a decade of my life into boxes.

I was too sick to do it myself.

The boxes were stored in a local Boston-area storage facility for over a year, until I had them moved to one near my parents’ home, where I was enduring a much-longer-than-expected recovery process.

Once my storage boxes and I were reunited, it would have been easy to get overwhelmed by the magnitude of the organizational project ahead of me. Each possession was frozen in time in whatever configuration my friends and family had left them during the packing process.

Most people never get the opportunity to go back through their things and clear out the clutter of the past. If not for this employment gap/recovery period, I probably never would have tackled it myself. But over the course of the next 8 months or so, I sorted through my storage unit, box by box.

Rather than finding all of the document scanning and box sorting tedious, I enjoyed it!

The reason why was surprising.

When I survived the surgery, I had a new lease on life but no idea who I was anymore. I had allowed Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM) to turn me into a shell of my former self.

I desperately wanted to find the real me again, and I found her buried in those boxes.

I Am…

While many of the boxes contained practical documents like bank statements, health insurance Explanations of Benefits (EOBs), and pay stubs, it was the less archival contents that were the most instructive about my old self. Here’s who I found and what I learned during my trip down memory lane:

…a Reminiscer

You could call me a pack rat, but never a hoarder. My pack rat tendencies stem from a deep sense of nostalgia. As such, I unpacked an extraordinary amount of memorabilia and souvenirs.

That meant combing through collections of: autographs; ticket stubs; playbills; childhood artwork; sticker books; slam books (who remembers slam books?!); and special editions of magazines (especially my beloved Entertainment Weekly; RIP to the print edition), among so much more.

It reminded me not to be ashamed of hanging onto the memories that evoke positive emotions or immediately take me back to moments in time I don’t wish to forget. My nostalgia is a key part of who I am.

…a Reader

Books filled box after box to the brim. There were children’s books, academic texts, at least 25 books in Spanish (a leftover from my college Spanish Major), and play scripts. I even had collections from my teenage years, including most of the Sweet Valley High series, which I purchased as soon as they became available at the Corner Book Shop in the New York suburb where I grew up. I also retained years’ worth of Summer Reading Challenge certificates of completion from the local library.

Before donating most of the books, I took pictures to document their legacy. A select few remain in my bookcase and my pared-down storage unit.

I remembered how much I love storytelling and that being a lifelong learner matters to me. After this project, I was inspired to take up listening to podcasts and to read more newsletters and personal essays.

…a Photographer

Everyone who knows me knows I take a lot of pictures. So, it should come as no surprise that the bulk of my scanning and documentation project was my photo albums. I have been a prolific photographer since the pre-digital camera days.

I scanned thousands of pictures, dating back to my very first pink Le Clic film camera in 1988; the first photo on the first roll of film was of my best friend and I. I had the negatives and everything! And those hard copy photos and negatives ran all the way up until 2004 when I finally got a digital camera.

Each photograph brought back a little piece of my life, a memory, a moment in time that my health-addled brain had let slip a little too far away. They served as the perfect reminder: don’t just take the pictures. Take them in abundance and look back through them again and again.

…a Music Lover

Remember cassette tapes? I had hundreds of them. Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl,” Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation,” and the soundtracks of “Les Misérables,” “Miss Saigon,” and “Newsies” blared from the cassette deck of my father’s car, whenever I could convince him to let me play them.

I was an avid radio listener too. It started in Junior High School when I would record mix tapes on blank cassettes from the playlist of the local alternative station, then later the Pop/Top 40 hits of New York’s Z100.

With the advent of CDs, I had hundreds more, in every genre, all filed neatly into CD binders.

Music is my constant companion when I drive, but in the aftermath of my surgery, I was driving less. I knew I needed to make more of an effort to keep music in my life and take advantage of its mood-boosting properties.

…a Writer

My most forgotten self was in my writing. I unearthed songs, essays, short stories, and diary entries. There were notebooks filled with ideas (including some with fashion designs?!).

My takeaway from finding my handiwork? I had the skills to write a memoir, which I started work on shortly thereafter. And I could write personal essays for a publication like “What’s Her Problem?”! It inspired me to sign up for my earliest writing classes.

…a Traveler

Every summer of my childhood, our family went on a road trip. The final destination was always my grandparents’ house in South Florida, but we found new routes from New York, and places to stop along the way, each year.

Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Disney World, St. Augustine, Texas, New Orleans, Kentucky, Tennessee, Niagara Falls. And at each stop, I bought souvenirs. I collected magnets, brochures, postcards, keychains, pencils, t-shirts, and more.

As an adult who went on my own trips, the souvenir collection only grew. For example, I kept every document from three trips to Spain and the European adventure with my best friend.

I wasn’t sure how much travel would be possible for me after my surgery, and I certainly couldn’t have imagined the additional disability and complications that would arise only a few years later. But I knew that seeing new places and experiencing other cultures was important to me.

…a Family Member and Friend

Among the most educational items I had stored were letters, postcards, and greeting cards. I kept every one I’d ever received.

So, unlike the financial documents, which I sent through the scanner and then the shredder without a deep dive into their contents, I sat down and read each hand-written note before scanning it for posterity.

I read every birthday card, including the ones my mother had been saving for me since my 1^st birthday.

I pored over letters that my best friend and I exchanged during our summer vacations, when we had to be pen pals until we could re-unite at home. Cell phones, emails, and text messages didn’t exist yet.

I read through folded notes my friends and I would pass to each other in the hallways between classes in Junior High School, back in the days when we were a little too catty for our own good.

I had holiday cards and graduation cards from elementary school all the way through graduate school.

There were: letters from ex-boyfriends; opening night cards from actors; drawings and letters from my godson and his brother; wedding, bridal shower, bachelorette party, and baby shower invitations; Valentine’s Day cards; thank you cards; birth announcements; and funeral programs.

You name the life event; I had a record of it.

I couldn’t help but think; “Look at all of these people who cared enough to send me real things in the mail! Look at the number of people who enjoyed working with me before I turned into a sick, grumpy mess! Look at all of these experiences I had!” That struck a chord with me.

It was also a reminder that I had plenty of faults too.

There were a few letters and postcards that I’m sure I didn’t respond to or reciprocate.

Thank you cards I should have sent.

Ways I could have been a less bratty kid or better big sister and friend at an earlier age.

The ones that hit home the most were the cards and letters from my grandparents. My paternal grandmother outlived my paternal grandfather by about a dozen years, and it was no secret how lonely she was after he passed. When I was in college, she would send me handwritten letters, and she almost always included a clipping; an article from a newspaper or magazine that she thought I would find interesting. She ended the letters with a request for me to call her to discuss the clippings.

I did call her sometimes. Other times, I didn’t. I was so wrapped up in being a college student and asserting my independence that I know I didn’t call in response to every letter I received. Now, the me who had lived through open-heart surgery wanted to be the kind of person who would have handled that differently.

So too with my maternal grandmother. Her letters, written in perfect script penmanship, asked for less of my attention in return, but showed just how much she and my maternal grandfather wanted to be part of my daily life, even though they lived in Florida and I was in New York. I found letters congratulating me on visits from the tooth fairy and thanking me for weaving scarves for them with a loom I’d gotten as a birthday present.

There were notes telling me about big trips they’d gone on and also about their weekly bowling outing. My maternal grandmother was always the most well-liked member of our family, because of her kindness and warmth, and re-visiting her letters was a good kick-in-the-pants reminder that it’s not enough that I look a little bit like her; I should strive to be more like her in the way I handle my life as well, and it’s never too late to start doing that.

Now, I am a dedicated sender of handwritten cards, especially for birthdays and holidays. And I try to lead with more kindness (even if I don’t always succeed).

How lucky was I?

I didn’t just find “stuff” in that storage unit. I found myself again.

I knew what my priorities were.

I knew what kind of person I wanted to be moving forward.

I knew how I wanted to handle friendships and relationships and that I wanted to prioritize those relationships over work.

I knew I wanted to keep learning, and changing, and documenting.

I knew I was getting a fresh start. How lucky was I?!

I actually do go back and look at all those things I scanned. The pictures, playbills, letters, postcards.

The “me” from before the surgery and the “me” that exists now aren’t exactly the same person. I think (at least, I hope) the current version of me is the better version. But it was important to remind myself of the things I’ve always enjoyed.

I don’t want to lose touch with the core of who I am, no matter what I go through.

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Each issue of “What’s Her Problem?” includes questions for further discussion. Leave a comment below!

This week’s questions:

Have you ever taken on an organizational project like this? What did you learn about yourself?

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