Are You In Or Out?

My mind is so clustered that I literally just spent about 5 hours (read: 15 minutes) trying to figure out how to start this post. So forgive me for my lack of introduction right now; I'd rather just dive right in.

This whole summer, I've been doing constant purging. Yikes, 'purge' is such a scary verb..... Let me rephrase...

This whole summer, I've been doing constant throwing away slash donating slash taking mental inventory of my belongings. Mostly my clothes. Because those plaid Roxy Bermuda shorts I thought were cute at one point in my life will not do me any good in England. And they definitely are not cute now, nor were they ever.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a pic of said shorts. However, here is the result of a few hours in the depths of my closet.

But we are coming down to the wire on my leaving date, and it's getting harder and harder to figure out what stays and what goes. 

I have 4 categories:
Donate to either charity or my friends.
Throw away, never to be seen again.
Keep here in a box to either pick up later or forever clutter my parents garage/attic.
Take with and start my own British clutter.

The last two options are definitely making me more crazy than the other options. I've always been really good about donating and throwing away what I don't need/use/wear.

There comes a point where your brain goes "well... NO, I don't NEED this, but I'd like it with me for no good reason." And to tell you the truth, my brain has been saying that a lot lately.

It's more about my sentimental belongings and less about the materialistic ones. And I will give you a prime example of this, but WARNING: TOTAL DORK ALERT.

I've had these two stuffed animals since I was one year old.

I would show you a picture of them now, but they are a whole bunch of mangled. So this is them back in the day when they were in their prime, but I CLEARLY was not. And i think I'm sitting on Angelina the Ballerina's lap. Good times.

I used to take them everywhere with me and couldn't even go to sleep without them for the longest time. I've long grown out of that phase where I needed them for everything, but they're still in my room. I feel like they're an irreplaceable part of my life.

Do I need to bring them? No. Do I want to? Absolutely.

So this whole process is just an eyeopener for me. It's great because I feel 100 times lighter getting rid of a lot that I don't need. At the same time, it's making me think hard about all of this "stuff" that clearly isn't just "stuff" to me.

Tell me I'm not alone! Has anyone else felt like you didn't need something, but it was so close to your heart that you couldn't imagine not having it there? Maybe it's from your childhood, or maybe it's the last bit of your favorite cake! I don't care, share your story! Ten points if it's as lame as mine!