accumulation
sorting our burdens
“Mediterranean” by @kira0art, made in p5.js
I have over 1,255 Spotify playlists. I'm a hoarder of songs, an intricate categorizer of abstract feelings and scenarios that sound waves paint and etch onto my brain. It's far too easy to accumulate, and far too hard to let go.
This accumulation has been a constant all my life: the aggregation of people, places, experiences. Clothes that I wore once. People that wore me once. Intertwined paths and transitory interactions that are collected and categorized and shuffled away into the cubicles of my life. Every so often an object in there becomes relevant again and I’ll file through the folders so it may flash for another moment.
I find it hard to believe that we can fully reinvent ourselves. We're all anchored to our upbringings and how we are nurtured, and the two bleed together over time until they are indistinguishable from each other. Accumulated fragments I pick up through living seep into me every day. These fragments act as my puppeteer moving the strings which stretch and transform me.
The past constantly exerts its pull upon me and I always try to break free. There's a burning passion we all possess to reimagine ourselves as we approach inflection points in our lives — the start of new relationships, new jobs, new cities. We want to escape our former selves. There are countless moments I wanted to change, perform the non-avoidant action or play the upstanding role but never did. These wires of our past continue to jerk and tug as we inevitably fall into the ruts and grooves that are carved by heavy tracks long ago. I'm a liar, a self-preserver, a control-freak. I have learned that while I cannot extricate or omit these unsavory qualities about myself, I can choose how they fit together in the puzzle of my life. Unlike my playlists that I have the agency to painstakingly delete one by one, I cannot do the same for the memories and the feelings and the people and the shame/mistakes/regrets that color my history. I must live with them. Move and shape them into their place.
It's unfortunate that most people treat themselves the same way that they treat forgotten chairs where they throw t-shirt upon t-shirt until it becomes a heaping pile. We wonder why we feel so constricted, so guilt-ridden as we coast through life with little intention as to what piles up within us. Mountains of emotion and experience that weigh and burden as we trudge along our collective path.
Accumulation is our human condition. If we are not collecting objects, then we collect memory and experience that is recorded unconsciously. No matter how minimalist or unconcerned of a person we may be, our past will inevitably seep through and resurface at some point. We cannot dispose of it. Then what are we to do? Can we lift the burdens we accumulate over the years?
I find that sorting brings some quiet amidst our personal chaos. When we sift through our baggage, we are exercising our agency over ourselves. We are leveraging our willpower and the mechanisms that crank and pull within us to construct our own personal world. I sort in so many ways: through writing, through creation/curation, through tears. I am capturing the things that are not mine and turning them into me. I am the engineer of the little components that blink and whirr and buzz in my machine. I rip pieces off the fabric that flutters around in my amorphous worldview and use them to sew myself together. This is what determines who I am.
From Cesare Pavese:
"To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship...Those who by their very nature can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. This is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it."
Through creation and reflection I am exercising the agency I possess upon the world. I start to understand my role by making things (e.g. writing) that reclaim these unpleasant aspects of my existence and mold them into something new. It’s a form of reassurance: the production and consumption and categorization of that around me helps me come to terms with all that I am.
I know that I hold control over the world that evolves within me. Conversely, while I may not hold that same control over all aspects of my environment, at the very least I can produce creations that help me to rediscover my relationship with the external.
I'm learning to sort and channel my burdens rather than to accumulate them. We serve as our own conduit, a bridge between our foreign exterior and our catalogued internal world. This is my self-preservation — a constant, careful rearrangement of the parts which compose me.