Day 16: Things You Can't Let Go Of

Growing up I had a bit of a hoarding problem. I call myself a pack rat as opposed to hoarder these days, but I think if no one stopped me I'd keep just about everything. Whenever I get a shoebox (every few years when someone buys me shoes because I won't, and the pair I won't stop wearing is falling apart) I fill it with "keepsakes": weird things I don't want to get rid of because they remind me of something that I don't necessarily want to forget. I have a terrible memory (though I remember a lot of the bad stuff) so every once in a while I look through it to reminisce.

The tag on my bag from my first trip to Supai in the Grand Canyon, various pins from my childhood, my pocket pikachu, and a very pretty fairy jar all of my teeth went in when I lost them. I associate different things with these objects, happy things.

From left to right:
1. The wrist band from my first successful 4th of July with Michael (kind of a crazy day but overall, awesome).
2. My high school IDs. Covered up my senior one because I look incredibly fat.
3. A bell my mom gave me that I rang a few times when I was too sick to talk, a patch from Girl Scouts, a two dollar bill, a Harry Potter bookmark.
4. The jewelry my lip was pierced with.
5. Tabs from Monster energy drinks when they used to put Ms into them for a limited time. I got a Monster almost every day Junior year for a while at lunch from Safeway across the street.

It's kind of lame stuff and Michael had to help me throw away a lot of paper stuff a few years ago as well as when I moved. I also keep things like movie tickets, foreign candy containers, jewelry that was made for me, polished rocks, and at one point I had a bunch of notes from high school but ended up throwing them away (after my mom went through them without asking).
Some of it I shouldn't keep. Some of it I know I should, and some I can never decide. I think I inherited this problem from my mother, because she almost never throws anything away, and tried really hard to make me pack up a ton of childhood things to bring with me here, which just would've ended up in our tiny storage outside, and I have a lot of unnecessary keepsakes as it is. 
Honestly it probably doesn't help with my "living in the past" problem. I think about things that have happened too much, and a lot of this junk doesn't exactly help. But I really don't open boxes every day and cry about things, I promise.
I just can't let go of a loooot of stuff.