I’ve spent my life with words. Reading words. Writing words. Listening to other people’s words in the therapy room. Speaking and teaching to groups… you know, with words.

As evidence to my commitment to words and their power, I’ve collected books. Hundreds of books.

Occasionally, when I’ve moved houses, I’ve purged a few books from my collection, but I have held onto most of them, and of course I always buy more. When I moved into my current home, I gave away about a hundred books and then shelved the rest of my massive collection. When my ex-husband dumped a bunch of boxes on my doorstep in 2020, I discovered dozens of books I hadn’t looked at in nearly a decade (if not longer), but I just let them sit in my garage for a few more years.

Until this last week.

Amanda (the C.O.O. of my business—and apparently of my life, LOL) and I have recently realized that to help the business grow, I need to do some clearing out of old junk from my life (both physical and psychic junk). I need to get accounts in order, fix some things around the house, create some infrastructure for my shoe habit, and… deal with my books (and old journals, which I’ll talk about in another post).

So, I started sorting through my library.

The goal was to radically purge, because these books have been weighing me down.

Books about religion from when I was unpacking my relationship with Christianity.

Books about fear and money and divorce and getting back on one’s feet after divorce.

Books about how to start a business.

Books about how to run a business.

Novels I read twenty years ago.

Novels I bought to read twenty years ago but never got around to reading.

Books about running.

Books people have given me that I should read (which I either have or have not read).

Books about the quantum field.

Books on New Thought philosophies.

Books about writing and teaching about writing.

Travel guides.

Travel memoirs.

Books about living off the grid.

Books about Tarot.

A complete matching set of Shakespeare’s plays (with font too small to read).

A complete set of matching Dicken’s volumes purchased at a garage sale (with pages falling out of some of them).

Matching bound classics.

And more…

You get the idea. I’ve purchased (or have been given) hundreds of books over the years on the topics that interest me or that I think SHOULD interest me.

My books chronicle periods in my life, things I’ve struggled with, interests that define me, and relationships that have influenced me.

But they’ve become heavy. Some of them accuse me of laziness because I never got around to reading them. Some of them remind me—every time I look at them—the heartbreak I’ve experienced and the hard times I’ve been through. Some of them are just ugly and falling apart.

They had to go.

So Amanda and I got to work. I sorted. She bagged them up.

I was brutal, keeping only travel guides, books written by friends, books I reference often or re-read frequently, books about witchy shit that give me joy and make me feel like magic is real, books on Jungian philosophy, books about writing and creativity, and a handful of novels or memoirs that I’ve bought within the last year.

And then we loaded these hundreds of books into Amanda’s car and drove to the Goodwill.

Don’t chew me out for not selling them to a used bookstore, pals. It took ten trips for each of us to drag them down my stairs and get them into the backseat and trunk of the vehicle. We weren’t going to do the same thing up and down the escalator at Third Place Books.

And really, I had to be swift in disposing of them. I could feel the sobs rising into my throat as we worked. This book was meant to help me stay in the marriage where I was losing self-respect. That book was purchased to help me leave the same marriage. This other book was forcing me to face responsibility for my choices. And that one over there was purchased when everyone was suddenly dying, and I was trying to find a reason to keep going through my grief.

If I didn’t move fast, I would think, I might need this again someday. Or, I might want to see what I wrote in the margins—might give me some insight I need.

Or, in the case of books I never read: I should get around to reading this, finally.

No! I had to purge.

You can’t make room for the next thing until you leave the current thing behind.

So we took it all down the road and let the guys at the donation station take these hundreds of books out of the car.

Amanda brought me home. We each drank a glass of wine. She left.

And I spent the rest of the day crying.

I cried for who I used to be.

For who I thought I should be but never turned out to be.

For who I wished I could be but finally had to admit I won’t be.

For who other people wanted me to be (and who I tried to be).

And for who I’ve been delaying becoming by holding on to all the other versions of me.

And then, I drank some more wine, watched Sex in the City, and crawled in bed.

This morning I don’t feel better. I still feel like someone I love died… because she did. But as we know, the Phoenix has to combust and sit around in her ashes for a while before she can rise again. So don’t worry about me (but do hug me if you see me); I will be okay. There’s room now for someone/something new. Let’s wait and see what will happen.