Little Joys
August 11, 2024
Writer: Ella Goldman
Editor: Allie Timmerman
I am a proud hoarder, but I was not always this way. Well, I unfortunately have always been a hoarder, though until recently, this character trait was not a source of any pride.
To others, I am told that I appear as an incredibly neat and organized person. My Google Calendar was updated with my upcoming semester’s schedule months ago, my laptop’s desktop files seem to be ripped directly from Pinterest, and essentially everything in my bookbag is color coded. I reluctantly admit, however, that these outside viewers have been misled. Like Monica Geller, I too have a well-hidden junk drawer…or seven.
My secret was first uncovered by my Marmar at age 8. While babysitting me, she opened up my nightstand table and turned to me with an unmistakable look of horror. Notepads from various hotels came pouring out, along with a library card that did not belong to me, half-finished string bracelets, and almost sixty random business cards. My type-A grandmother promptly declared our intended night of Hallmark movies would be replaced by cleaning out my junk drawer, and I almost immediately responded with tears. Unsurprisingly, my Marmar got her way. While my siblings giggled with Papa downstairs, we spent the subsequent two hours picking through each piece of “trash” I had hoarded over the years. I was forced to assign value to my accumulated belongings, deciding which would be neatly and kindly given a designated home, while tragically tossing the rest away. By the end of our night my nightstand was nearing empty, but my heart felt heavy.
Nearly two weeks later when Marmar returned to babysit and asked to assess our work from her preceding visit, my short 8 years flashed before my eyes. Shame engulfed me as she bent down to open the drawer to ultimately face my failure. My nightstand had regressed to its former state, and the only person to blame was me. This process of cleaning and assigning and tossing and assessing was repeated time and time again, but the end result never altered. Throughout every new week, I would gather new trinkets from my silly, random childhood adventures, and immediately shove them into the nearest drawer. I was told that holding onto this worthless garbage was ridiculous, and a behavior I needed to eradicate before it got out of hand. And while, yes, maybe 8-year-old Ella did not necessarily need a business card for a butcher 40 minutes from my house, she knew something I had long since forgotten: the importance of noticing and holding onto the little things.
As an incredibly anxious individual, I have spent most of my life feeling overwhelmed. I have felt like an outsider in my own story, often feeling as though I am watching my life rather than living it. From a young age I was taught to dedicate my energy to some future goal. Told to determine who I wanted to be years from now and strive to achieve this identity, with little instruction on the means to do so. Due to this ingrained goal-oriented mindset, I, along with so many others, find it easy to get caught up in life’s big picture moments. We lead our lives in pursuit of reaching some ambiguous destination, and seldom stop to enjoy the journey on the way.
When I think of little me and her little junk drawer(s), I see a girl who wanted to cherish and remember each day. She unknowingly reminded me that these seemingly insignificant mementos held the meaning of a moment. Since reflecting on my past-self’s inability to part ways with souvenirs from my own life, I have decided to reimplement this practice in a more productive (and organized!) way. With this choice, I transformed my hoarding tendencies into a way of memorializing the miniature moments we tend to forget.
Journaling, for me, came in waves. Actually, my nightstand has held at least three half-filled journals in it at all times since ’09. I adored the idea of a bullet journal aesthetically detailing each day I lived, from the number of hours I slept to the feelings I felt. I knew after a single attempt it would be my last, as it quickly felt like a chore. Typical thought-journaling worked for a while, but I soon realized my inclination to journal only arose when I needed to vent. I was left with a journal filled not with happy moments, but rather with exclusively anxious thoughts. Then came the junk journal.
I had first come across the concept of a junk journal on TikTok, and when my lovely sister returned from Bali with a leather, handmade red journal for me last summer, I took it as a sign to start. The process is simple: try to collect ordinary, regular items from your daily activities and compile them into a journal. Like 8-year-old me, I hold on to ticket stubs, receipts, stickers, and essentially anything that a normal person would identify as garbage. Through junk journaling, I found a way to turn my shame into a specialty, now having tangible ways to look back through my initially dull, but nonetheless important, little moments of my life. And luckily, this method has deterred my family from signing me up for TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive.
If, like my grandma, the thought of collecting trash still irks you, there are other ways to acknowledge and celebrate the typically unnoticed joyful moments that we experience each day. Whatever your own chosen method may be, by placing a deliberate focus on the ordinary beauties of daily life, we can discover the common bliss that exists amongst the mundane and allow ourselves to enjoy life along the way: not only when we get to our desired destinations.
