Ghosts in the shadows...

So after putting it off for as long as humanly possible (which means I was on the verge of getting kicked out in my mother's terms) I am actually cleaning my room today.  To be fair, I should note that I probably could have procrastinated longer, except that my aunt and uncle are coming to visit today and will be residing in my cluttered space, so really, as always, necessity is the mother of intervention.  (Yes, I realize that is not the quote in its original wording, but I prefer this version, especially as it has been far more applicable to my life.)  Anyways, after shuffling some things around, throwing lots of things away, and realizing with horror just how much laundry I have in front of me, I stumbled across the OTHER reason I hate to clean in the bottom drawer of my bedside dresser.  There, I found old pictures, some from my ill-fated first year of college, some dating all the way back to middle school, and an old card from my latest ex-boyfriend. (Latest because he was the last real relationship I had, not because the break was recent.)  These are no doubt things that I threw in a laundry basket while moving from here to there, and then never really unpacked and so re-threw them into hiding in an empty drawer when I got wherever I was going.  (Which is what I was in the process of doing again, no doubt, when I stumbled across these unwelcome reminders from what I consider to be my largely failed past.)  I wonder now if I had ever taken the time in all of my furious moves from problem A to problem B to actually unpack what I had taken with me,  somehow I could have seen what went wrong, acknowledged my role in that (a VERY important oversight), and then been able to put it away cleanly, if perhaps that would have helped me from repeating so many frustrations again and again and...well, you know.  Now don't get me wrong, I have never been too much into home decor, far too cluttered to ever attempt any kind of feng shui, but it really bothers me now to realize that I was tricking myself each time I relocated, thinking I could just stash things wherever and they would never come back to haunt me. As if somehow a wooden drawer would shut in my mind and I would never have to look at what happened.  I truly believe that having these things hiding around me is unhealthy.  I have come father than I ever have before towards clawing my well out of the well I dived into (note I don't say fell, I went willingly knowing what would happen) and this time I really have no desire to slip back, to rehash, to open a drawer and be side-lined by a familiar script I forgot to make peace with in my haste to be back to "normal" overnight.  It dawns on me that before I go anywhere else, I am going to have to open all my junk drawers, look at those memories head-on, feel what I need to feel and then quietly move on.  My aunt told me once that there is nothing wrong with taking that baggage that holds you back and finding a nice spot on the side of the road to set it down and then just walk away.  At the time, I thought that was a brilliant notion, and so I strived against the voices in my head to put the past somewhere out on route 66 for some random cyclist to see it later and wonder what the hell it was.  Unfortunately, when you have hidden all your baggage in drawers and closets and attics and any other space you can find that sheds no trace of light upon it, it's not so easy to just bag it all up and leave it somewhere.  The battle now will be to discover exactly where all of mine is and then to carefully, slowly, and consciously say good bye.  Like two of my most recent life projects (school and weight-loss) I know this won't go as quickly for me as I want it too, but I will be able to get there if I keep at it and try to focus on it deliberately day by day, and hopefully at the end my release will be as peaceful and complete as I yearn for, so that the next move will be real.