I recently expressed a wish to exchange letters with my younger self and clearing out my childhood room (my parents want space for a rowing machine!) this weekend felt as close to that wish as I could get.

Amongst the treasures I found:

• A magnificent collection of Beanie Babies.
• Every single Destiny’s Child album. Survivor had been the one I had loved the most.
• Every single Harry Potter book.
• Notepads filled with grand schemes, scribbles, and travel plans.
• A poem a boy wrote for me when we were both teenagers.
• A Friend’s pencil packed with pens, pencils, a WHSmith branded stapler, a Pritt Stick, and a drawing compass. The toolkit I took with me to school each day.
• Two Casio calculators, a main one plus a back up. Both would be stacked up one on top of the each in the corner of my little wooden desk during exams.
• A Nokia 3310.
• Essays from school and University.
• The Spice album.
• A Game Boy with the Pokémon blue game still in its slot.

The list goes on and on and on.

I didn’t get very far in clearing out my childhood room. 🙂 I spent a long time jotting down memories that each item brought up and waging an internal war over whether or not I should throw it away.

If I were to exchange letters with my younger self, I’m pretty sure both versions of myself would give similar advice: Learn to let go. Be grateful for what you have had but don’t hold onto it so tightly that it stops you from being grateful for what you have now. Learn from your mistakes but don’t let them scare you into a shell.

Clearing out my childhood room will be slow process, not one that I can do in one weekend, but I’ll get there at my own pace and my parents will get their rowing machine eventually. 🙂