Keep, donate, toss: could life be as easy to organise as moving house?​on February 10, 2025 at 1:00 pm

Reporting from within the walls of a cardboard city: in six days, I’m moving house. Again. My mother and I tallied it up; this will be my 38th move in 33 years. I am my own rental crisis.

There’s a quip here about instability breeding instability, or a line from a cheesy old song: These vagabond shoes are longing to stray … I’ve heard it all before. With an audiobook, enough bubble wrap and a looming deadline, I can pack up my entire world in a leisurely three days, and find myself settled into a new life by the week’s end. New home, new me.

There’s no childhood home for me, no door frame notched with pencil lines tracking my height over the years, no neighbourhood so familiar that my cortisol plummets just driving through it. I’m a houseplant: roots only stretching as far as my container allows, craving natural light.

So good at this by now, I have a painstaking process: I move room to room, filling one box completely before taping together another. I number the boxes and itemise their contents in my phone so that I might be able to search “spatula” at the other end and avoid tearing through my new place like a hungry raccoon. As I pack, I keep three containers in the middle of the room — keep, donate, toss — and every item I lay hands on gets dropped into one or another.

How nice it would be, I think, if the rest of my life was so organised.

I’d keep all my achievements: my books, this column. I’d keep my dog, my closest friends, a Burberry coat I couldn’t afford when I bought it at 22, and still can’t afford now. Blurry memories of long nights spent laughing and spinning and drinking so much champagne my bloodstream felt carbonated, all the stamps in my passport, my special ability to make perfect Moka pot coffee every single time. All my years of therapy — I’ll keep those, I’ll need them for the long winter. That growth and resilience comes with me to each new apartment, waiting on the hall table in every entryway, picked up with my keys every time I leave the house.

There’s plenty left to donate. Someone else would get some use out of the hard-learned lessons of my twenties: that the cooler your job is, the more it will make you miserable; that flossing actually is important; that Sambuca is never a good idea; that if you have to ask if they care about you, then you probably already have your answer.

Most of my exes can go straight into the donation pile too; one woman’s trash and all that. Some of them donated themselves to new owners before I even knew about it, and some were only ever rented in the first place.

I’d donate my apathy and hope someone upcycles it into something more practical. All my ideas for books and stories that never quite got off the ground, I’d box them up and drop them at Savers, so someone else can polish them up and bring them to life.