Me, A Teenage Hoarder

I think I'm a hoarder...I'm like an old lady hoarder who refuses to let go of things because she's convinced that she will end up needing them later on in life for no reason in particular. Here are some pictures of my room as evidence...

One of my favorite parts of my room, it's right by my bed and has all my special little trinkets...Oh, and a random hair tie.

This is right above that shelf. This is where it all started, with that letter right in the middle. It spiraled out of control from there

My movie ticket stubs are all on the top with some New York postcards, I still have so many to add. 

This is the newest corner of my room. It's very special in that it combines things from both San Francisco and Houston, two cities with two halves of my heart. 

Clearly, minimalist design is not my thing. I hoard movie ticket stubs (I have some dating back to 2012), postcards (people don't actually send me postcards, I usually buy them for myself lol), birthday cards (even the birthday cards from my 3rd grade homeroom that people were forced to write me because everyone got a card on their birthday), plane tickets (there's something satisfying about seeing the places I've traveled), take-out menus (because what if I need to remember where I ate that heavenly Korean fried chicken that one time? it was Dak&Bop just FYI), clothes (I don't care if my thighs can't breathe and I can't actually sit down in these jeans mom, they're comfy), old pictures (I'm torn between being disgusted by my younger self and thinking I'm the cutest person alive), and people.

Yes, I hoard people. But not in the creepy I-keep-people-locked-in-my-nonexistent-basement kind of hoarding. It's more like we've-been-friends-forever-and-I-don't-know-what-my-life-would-be-like-without-you kind of way. But also not the wow-you-contribute-so-much-to-my-life kind of "what would my life be like without you", but the I'm-terrified-of-change-and-I-don't-know-how-to-let-you-go kind of way. Does that make sense? It made sense in my head...

Change scares the crap out of me. I don't know how to cope with sudden or even gradual change. Sudden change is like the death of a loved one. I talked about my grandpa in my last blog post and I'm slowly learning to cope with that kind of change. But you know what I haven't figured out? Gradual change. Gradual change like friends who drift away before you even realize what's happening. One minute you're hanging out every weekend and the next thing you know, you haven't spoken in months. Or you're in every class together for years until one year you finally don't and your relationship becomes a head nod in the hallway or a swipe-up on a Snapchat story from time to time. It's so depressing. I don't know about ya'll, but when I become friends with someone, I give them a piece of me. It sounds cliche, I know. But it's hard for me not to invest so much in people who I think deserve the world. That's the kind of person I am, and sometimes, a lot of the times, it comes back to bite me.

Sooner or later, for me it was later, you realize that your friends are not the perfect people you want to believe they are. For the longest time, I put my friends on a pedestal. I really thought they could do no wrong and I began to put them before everything. It got to the point where my relationship with my friends started to interfere with my relationship with my faith and my family, two things that should be significantly more important. It honestly wasn't until junior year that it really hit me, painfully, that I couldn't continue like this.

I couldn't keep hoarding my friends. Movie tickets, postcards, birthday cards, plane tickets, clothes, and pictures were fine. But I couldn't keep hanging onto people who I thought were my friends. I mean, they were my friends at some point. I'm not going to try and pretend that the history we had wasn't real. Brangelina is over, but that doesn't mean we can ignore the fact that they made some pretty killer movies together.

2018 just started and I think a popular New Year's Resolution or just resolution in general is "CUT OUT THE TOXIC PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE". I say this in all caps because I feel like people are so adamant that this is the solution to all your problems. Just "snip, snip" and BOOM, a weight is lifted and you're off the hook. Free to start over. I don't think it's that simple. How can you just "snip, snip" years of memories and shared experiences? You will never find the same relationship with someone or recreate what you had with that person ever again. So how can you just "snip, snip"?

(Don't even get me started on the technical part of actually cutting people out of your life. Ghosting is rude and cowardly. I've been on both sides of the equation, it's not pretty and I'm not proud of it. And it's not like you can just "talk to them about it". How do you even start that conversation? "Hey, I don't really want to be friends with you anymore. I'm cutting toxic people out of my life #newyearnewme". That's just mean, man).

It's not that my friends are actually toxic people. When it comes down to it, I still love them so much and I truly believe that they have good hearts, but people change. In this case, my friends have started to change into people I don't recognize. Or they just get caught up in their own life and our schedules don't work out anymore. Neither of those things is something that I can blame them for. I can't blame my friends for making decisions that maybe aren't ones that I would have made. I can't blame them for living their life, a life that doesn't revolve around me.

I think "cut out the toxic people in your life" should be changed to-
"let go of the people who don't make an effort to stay in your life".

It's taken me years, years I'm telling you, to realize what one of the most important parts of a good friendship is- effort. EFFORT IS EVERYTHING. Your friends can change or life can get busy, but when someone stops putting effort into the friendship, that's when it starts to go downhill. There's no such thing as an "effortless friendship", or "effortless any-relationship" for that matter. Everyone wants to say communication is the most important thing right? But how far does communication go when you don't put in the effort to follow through with that communication? I can tell you that I'll get brunch with you this weekend but never actually make plans. You can text me a whole paragraph about how you feel about our relationship lately and I can promise you that I'll try harder, but I won't. I can tell you how I feel about you going to that party, and you'll hear me but you won't listen. All of that is communication with none of the effort.

And when I say effort, I don't mean shower me in flowers and food. I don't mean we have to hang out 24/7. I don't mean you have to listen to every piece of advice I give you. Effort means following through with the little things. You want to FaceTime in one hour but only for 15 or 20 minutes? I'm down for it, but you have to follow through or else it doesn't really mean anything.

Another thing about effort in a friendship or relationship, it should be a two-way thing, something I really had trouble grasping. Both people should be putting in the effort to maintain the relationship. But nevertheless, I'm the hoarder. I'm the one hanging onto the remnants of a friendship when there's really nothing left. I'm the first to call, to ask to hang out, to ask how you've been, to surprise you with food on a bad day. I do these things because I want to and it's how I show my love, but also because I have this irrational fear that if a friendship is falling apart, it's going to be my fault. I'm the one that let it fall apart. And this kind of thinking honestly made life really hard for the longest time. It's not that I can't see that the other person is not putting in effort, I just didn't want to let go...I still don't want to let go.

I kid you not, as I write this blog post, it's actually me rationalizing with myself. All of my blog posts are me talking to myself. Like right now, I'm trying to convince myself that this kind of gradual change is not my fault. That if I lose some friendships that I thought would last forever, it's not for a lack of trying. I did my best. I'm trying to convince myself of all this while trying to pass it as me giving ya'll advice. That's the beauty of having this blog, I'm my own therapist and ya'll get a kick out of it. At the very least, even if I'm writing about my own life, I hope you guys find some piece of yourself or take something away from reading this. Whether it's in one random sentence I said or you totally know what I'm talking about, I hope you don't have toxic people in your life or that you know when to let go.

For now, I'm going to start by taking some things off my wall that no longer need to be there...




Scroll down for a surprise...

As if I was going to say "let it go" in my blog post and not include a meme.