OpEd: The Unbearable Heaviness of Being….

Copyright 2021 by Trish Causey. All Rights Reserved.

As I am supposed to be packing up my apartment, mostly lots & lots of boxes of books, I am really feeling the density of physicality. Just how much physical stuff we humans accumulate, how much crap we surround ourselves with — even though it’s cool stuff like boxes & boxes of books.

My landlord made the comment that if for some reason I didn’t get my stuff out in time tomorrow (Monday — a federal holiday, no less), that all my belongings would belong to the new tenant, who moves in first thing Tuesday. And at this point, I’m ready to say, “Fuck it. Yeah, you can have all this.” I’m tired of dragging these boxes from one abode to a storage unit to another abode to another storage unit, over & over again.

I wish I had been at this place of surrender of all this stuff even a week ago because I could have made arrangements to donate all these books — over 50 boxes of books — to a university library. As much as I have always loved books, I’m really not interested in getting information outside of myself at this point in my life. So, continuing to cart around all these boxes of other people’s thoughts & other people’s perspectives is so unbearingly & unnecessarily heavy.

I’m also thinking of the different odds & ends & pieces of my life that I took with me to Los Angeles in 2017. Some of these very things, I had taken with me in my car. When I was homeless, living out of my car, having these things did not actually make me feel better or closer to the idea of a home. And yet, I traveled with these boxes of music, & song books, & Irish goddess statues, & so many other things — only to have my car stolen in San Francisco, my things trashed, & an unbelievable sense of violation at the way a bunch of assholes treated my belongings — my things.

There is such a heaviness that I’m feeling right now. A big part of me just does not care about all this physical stuff. I want to feel free again, but these material possessions are weighing me down emotionally, psychologically, & even spiritually.

This density is just too much. For over a month, I’ve been ready to just get in my car & go. But I stayed. As such, I guess I have to do something with all of these books. And my washer & dryer. And my 3-piece sectional seating. And my mattress. And all my heavy, dense things….

This will be the last time I move this stuff into a storage unit that I’m paying for by the month simply because I have not yet been able or willing to let go. I love knowledge too much to just throw these books away, & yet, transporting them to yet another storage unit is expensive, time-consuming, & delaying the inevitable in deciding what to do with them.

I would love to be at a place in my life & my soul mission to settle down in my little witchy cottage deep in the woods, where I can have built-in bookshelves in every room — along with a fireplace in every room á la Voltaire. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen for a long time. And the thought of paying storage fees every month until such time as I have my perfect, little witchy cottage deep in the woods just seems ridiculous to me.

Therefore, as per my landlord’s threat, I’m really tempted to just leave all this stuff here for the next tenant to deal with. But that’s just fanciful thinking. I won’t actually do that to him.

Dammit…..

trish