Unfucking - papers 1997-99 and 2000-03
May. 30th, 2015 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dynamite_ladyI get that the endless descriptive unfucking updates I'm capable of are not to everyone's taste, so I've given it a seperate tumblr here. So if you like pretty pictures of the messier parts of people's homes, that's the place to look.
The wider context of this post is my endless attempts to unfuck my 'study' (euphemism for 'dumping ground', but I don't want it to be!), starting with the many bags of assorted papers my parents brought over on their last visit, which happened to be when I was going through an epic depressive phase and not in the best condition to deal with it. These bags had been occupying the doorway for a couple of months and hindering my efforts to do anything that involved having access to the room.
In the meantime, gah, I'd underestimated the emotional crap attached to notes from high school in particular. This is the work that kept me anchored when I was going through and getting out of a particularly awful relationship, and the quality or lack thereof of each piece often reflects the ups and downs of that process. Not always - there's a weird pride in thinking 'these are the notes I took with the phone wedged against my ear while he was threatening to kill himself or me or both and my housemate was shouting at me to get off the phone and I felt like handing it to her so she could get a dose of real life and they aren't even abnormal psych notes this time'. Hey, I put the qualifier 'weird' in for a reason. Suffice to say this contributed to decisions regarding what to keep or ditch.
Pretty cool to go through the university stuff though. I'd worried a bit that I wouldn't be able to get rid of any of that. Some things, however, were obvious recycling candidates - there were modules I had to take that brought me no joy whatsoever. Of course there were also modules that are still relevant to things I do or might teach, so I hung onto a lot of papers from those. I also now have a stock of early essays to show my students that, actually, the sort of critical comments I give them aren't an academic death sentence - I had at least my fair share, especially in the early stages. It's frustrating that the general unsortedness of my mid-to-late twenties meant that certain things weren't available to me when I was teaching relevant subjects over the last couple of years.
The wider context of this post is my endless attempts to unfuck my 'study' (euphemism for 'dumping ground', but I don't want it to be!), starting with the many bags of assorted papers my parents brought over on their last visit, which happened to be when I was going through an epic depressive phase and not in the best condition to deal with it. These bags had been occupying the doorway for a couple of months and hindering my efforts to do anything that involved having access to the room.
In the meantime, gah, I'd underestimated the emotional crap attached to notes from high school in particular. This is the work that kept me anchored when I was going through and getting out of a particularly awful relationship, and the quality or lack thereof of each piece often reflects the ups and downs of that process. Not always - there's a weird pride in thinking 'these are the notes I took with the phone wedged against my ear while he was threatening to kill himself or me or both and my housemate was shouting at me to get off the phone and I felt like handing it to her so she could get a dose of real life and they aren't even abnormal psych notes this time'. Hey, I put the qualifier 'weird' in for a reason. Suffice to say this contributed to decisions regarding what to keep or ditch.
Pretty cool to go through the university stuff though. I'd worried a bit that I wouldn't be able to get rid of any of that. Some things, however, were obvious recycling candidates - there were modules I had to take that brought me no joy whatsoever. Of course there were also modules that are still relevant to things I do or might teach, so I hung onto a lot of papers from those. I also now have a stock of early essays to show my students that, actually, the sort of critical comments I give them aren't an academic death sentence - I had at least my fair share, especially in the early stages. It's frustrating that the general unsortedness of my mid-to-late twenties meant that certain things weren't available to me when I was teaching relevant subjects over the last couple of years.