Life inside boxes
MOVING. Sounds exciting, but in reality it is an excessive amount of cardboard and random artefacts you had completely forgotten you own.
One discovery I have made in the past week is that there is nothing like moving house to have you pondering some life questions.
It’s not only shifting all of your belongings from one place to another, but saying goodbye to one home and trying to make a safe familiar place in another.
My family spent the last week packing up the rental and moving into a new house in one of the new estates popping up around Geelong and it has been such an eye-opener to what 23 years of hoarding accomplishes.
You do not realise how much junk you accumulate until you are forced to pack it all up and move it to a different place.
Unpacking was an absolute nightmare.
Every time I thought I had arranged all of my belongings the removalists would dump yet another box of things that I definitely have no need for any more but for some reason am struggling to farewell.
Even though I know I can live without all of these objects. it seems almost impossible to part with them. Sure, the couple years worth of sports trophies from my fitter younger years are useless to me now and are probably going to continue to sit in a box for the next couple of years but throwing them out seems an impossible task. It’s funny when you think about it, how easy it is to become attached to material items and this strange feeling of comfort they offer.
We live in an age where everyone is walking around with the means to record and capture, and every moment can be easily stored for later viewing.
We don’t really live in the moment anymore and I feel like this is the reason we all feel obligated to keep things we “may need one of these days”.
I’m not saying no one should keep certain items of sentimental value because they are what can make a house feel like a home, but I don’t want to become someone who is held back by baggage of the past in the form of objects filling up the shelf.
I’m also at that stage of my adulthood where I probably really should be thinking about moving out and fending for myself rather then moving with my family.
More than one person pointed this out to me when the topic of my family’s house shift arose.
While I sit in relative comfort in my new room writing this piece I wonder how many more years I can stay living at home before it starts to become strange.
Living with your parents into your mid-20s seems to carry such a bad stereotype, an unfair one if you ask me.
If my parents ever wanted me to take that leap of faith and finally leave the nest, they probably shouldn’t have given me a room with an ensuite and lack of real life adulthood things like rent, food and electricity bills.
The security and comfort of a family home is something that should never be taken for granted and the money I have saved has allowed me to travel to places I could have never afforded if I was trying to juggle living expenses.
I know a lot of my peers who have stayed at home well into their 20s so they can save and study. It doesn’t mean they are behind in life because they were not out at 18.
With the commitments that some university courses demand from their students, such as months of unpaid placement at a time, it would be almost impossible for people to live out of home without some kind of support.
That being said, if you are just slumming around the house all day getting mum and dad to wash your clothes it’s probably time to leave.
If this moving experience has taught me anything, it’s that I need to get a little better at spring cleaning, and learn to let go of the little things.
Sometimes objects are just objects and should not get in the way of you getting older and moving on. Jaimee Wilkens is a Deakin University journalism student and former Geelong Advertiser intern.