For roughly the past decade, I’ve owned two filing cabinets which I’ve filled up every year or two with a bunch of paperwork, including utility bills, bank statements, insurance documents, etc.

In a conversation with Mrs. O last night, we stumbled upon an interesting question: do I really need all of these documents? Why do I carry them all with me? After all, I am 30 years old, do I really need, for example, cable bills from 2001?

So tonight I started emptying them. Roughly 75% of it I was able to throw away immediately, but there wasn’t just “business” stuff in there. There was also some memorabilia from my trip to Europe and birthday/Christmas cards that I had saved and forgotten about.

As I flipped through these cards, I began to feel sadness… and for a little while I thought I missed these people–my family, some friends… but as I went through, it felt less like missing them and more it felt like complete loneliness… and back during the years I was revisiting–1997 through 2001–I did feel completely and utterly alone. What I might have missed–if it can even be called that–was the care and love of my family and friends who at best did nothing to help and at worst kept me in that place of loneliness and despair.

The primary reason I know it wasn’t because I missed them was because my feelings didn’t dissipate but instead grew more intense. When I realized I was feeling despair, the feeling diminished.