We all hoard relics from our past, but it's time to de-junk your life, writes Kathryn Holmquist.
We've got too much stuff. We hide it under beds, in cupboards, under the stairs, in the attic, in the shed. We're like magpies, keeping things that mean nothing to anyone but us.
To the outer world, we may appear well-organised and tidy - even minimalist. But most of us have a hidden life of boxes, the detritus of our lives, looking like clutter to others, but full of memories and emotions for those of us who squirrel it away.
Ever wonder what would happen to your trappings if you were to keel over and die? What would people find that would make any sense? If you're a Francis Bacon or a Andy Warhol, you're covered. Your chaotic litter is museum-quality and arts commentators will be paid to make profound statements about all that you leave behind. Everyone else, be aware that when you go, you're old junk will be an emotional burden to your survivors.
The horror strikes you in the auction rooms, when you open the musty drawers of Victorian chests and lift the lids of mildewed trunks and find the photographs, letters, ticket stubs, scraps of paper. You know the story just by the smell. Someone has died, nobody was around who cared enough to inspect the baggage as its owner made their exit from this world. Or, perhaps, nobody could face the task.
A woman I met at a party recently admitted to being in the midst of "decluttering". Agonising over the memories she had been landed with by her parents on their death: she was sorting through memorabilia and love letters. She daren't read them - too private. So what should she do? Keep them in the attic for another, neutral, generation to discover? Treasured letters, kept for 50 years, how dare you burn them? You need to think long and hard before you take decisive action. She's in a quandary, thanks to the emotional quarry left by her progenitors.
But it's not just the pain that hoarding causes other people. Another friend, we'll call him Rudy, has a reputation as an impeccably dressed man of taste. His house is another story: covered in overflowing ashtrays, food crumbled into cushions, bottles and dishes on the tables and floor, books and magazines on every conceivable surface.
Rudy lives in the abstract - in an intellectual world where everything must be beautiful. Yet his real world is quite the opposite. You could say the same for his relationships, which are chaotic and disposable. If Rudy decluttered his house, would he find order in his emotional life too? Some people think so.
At least, that is the premise of the BBC's series The Life Laundry, in which a decluttering expert, Dawna Walter, forces people to confront the reasons behind their manic stockpiling. Dawna is making a career from the dawning realisation that we're a culture of trash-stashers, holding on to useless objects because we can't make any sense of our lives.
We keep things because they mean something, but often we're not quite sure what they mean. Look in your bedside cupboard, in that basket you keep by the telephone, in that box at the bottom of the cupboard. Do you really need all that junk? Is that who you are - the letters, the photographs, the unworn jumpers from 1984, the twisted tubes of out-of-date moisturiser, the prescription from 1995, the runners that you wore once to a fitness class then forgot about?
One close friend confided that she had kept clothes 10 years out-of-date because they reminded her that she was once young and size eight. Our paraphernalia chronicles our lives, piquing our memories long after the possessions have lost their usefulness. Okay, be your own personal fashion museum. The 1980s are back in style, I admit, but do you really want to wear those shoulder pads again? For years, I was a hoarder. I kept my dead mothers' negligees, a curl of baby-hair in a metal lozenge box - lots of things that reminded me of her.
The curl of hair could have been mine, or could have been my brother's. I also kept programmes, postcards, brochures, invitations, photographs, Paris Metro tickets and love letters from people long forgotten. Then, one day, I suddenly couldn't take the detritus and dust any more. It might have had something to do with the abandoned belongings I found in auction rooms, but it had more to do with a sudden and overwhelming need to live in the present. I was tired of living in a mausoleum of memories.
I got rid of everything in one fell swoop. I cried while I did it. Some things I burned ceremonially, with a prayer, the rest I packed into dozens of bin bags. A man charged me €200 to take it all away. €200! Far more than it was worth to anyone. As he walked away, I heard the man say to his friend, "another fine rip-off". To me, it was a ripping away, not a rip-off.
Getting rid of the wreckage is spiritually cleansing. The fashion for Feng Shui has less to do with the spiritual benefits of having a crystal in the Eastern corner, and more to do with the fact that rearranging the furniture makes you feel good. You cannot be spiritually clear in a space that looks like a bomb hit it.
Living minimally, with few possessions, makes you feel spiritual but does it really work? We know, deep down, that we are spiritual creatures who can't take it with us. Yet the "it" is so endearing. It defines who we are, who our lovers, spouses, children are. Each disposable item is a memory. The existential question in the materialistic age is: if I have no glorious hoard of "rejectamenta", do I exist? It's a question that the people forced out by the recent floods in Ringsend, Dublin, must be asking. On radio, one woman described how family photographs belonging to her father had been destroyed. "This means everything to him," she said. And it's true.
Some little things mean a lot - keep them. Put them in proper albums, or in glass-fronted cupboards or whatever you like. Sort through your stuff and decide what is valuable and what isn't.
But if stuff from your past is more valuable than stuff from your present, you have a problem. I know a guy who has kept everything from his 20s - diaries, L.P.s , guitars, T-shirts. Now he's in his 40s and married with children. Yet he regrets the way he's tied down. Hanging on to the remnants of his bachelorhood is his way of hanging on to youth. Ask me, and I would consider his decision to throw it all in a skip as a step forward (I'm also friends with his wife).
There's a very lucrative business in going through people's bin bags, the more famous the better. Jane (we'll call her that) is the partner of a millionaire Irishman and has invested in a shredder. I can understand it. The National Enquirer got many front page stories from people's garbage.
So if that's not fair warning, good luck.
The Life Laundry is on BBC2, Wednesdays, at 8.30 p.m.