I’m packing for a move. My two housemates (who are a couple) bought a house farther east and I’m going with them. It won’t be convenient to get downtown, but I’ll have a garden to grow vegetables and flowers.

My housemate says she enjoys getting ready for a move. She likes the getting rid of things and paring down to only what she really wants. I hate every part of moving. I dislike a change in lifestyle. I dislike a change in physical space. I get anxious if my housemates so much as express a desire to rearrange furniture in the living room or reorganize the kitchen. Even if a current setup is ridiculously inefficient I would still prefer to keep it over change. Then once I settle into the new routine, I get flustered when it’s messed with.

Moving is the very worst and the very worst of moving is deciding what to bring. I hate culling my things. It shows me how wasteful I am, and if I am this wasteful, imagine how wasteful we all are as humans. There is so much waste in the world. Why isn’t the world filled with waste? Where is it going? The ocean is filling with plastic crap. When I move, I feel like I am killing the world.

This is also the way I feel in an IKEA.

These are the shameful casualties of my excessive materialistic life to be cast away:

• Things that I never unpacked when I first moved in and sat around my bedroom in eyesore brown cardboard boxes.
• Clothes that I will never be thin enough to fit in again.
• Clothes that I never hand-mended because I was lazy.
• Clothes that I never mended because I couldn’t motivate myself to learn how to use my sewing machine.
• Food, like that several-years-old tub TVP that went stale/creepy.
• Things I got out of free boxes that I’m just putting back into a free box.
• Costume pieces I’ve nearly destroyed but still feel like I could get one more use out of.
• Books I intended to read but I’ve lugged to two houses already and never did.
• Crafting items, like beads I stopped caring about, yarn for knitting I will never get around to, watercolor paints that dried up.

All of these things were promises to myself to be a more productive, creative person and they all represent my failures. Crafting materials are the most painful to give up. I work with my brain, rarely my hands. I promised myself I would make more time to work with my hands. I promised myself this and each dried-up tube of watercolor paint is a broken promise.