In November last year I started a life laundry. Not the kind you see on reality tv where vapid people chuck out last season’s tat to the delight of millions of viewers worldwide, but an emotional life laundry. Out came my emotional baggage and into the skip it went. It was heavy going. I spent four months just writing everything down – vomiting verbally onto the page. I finished one 12-month journal in only six months.
Then in February, I decided to spring clean and I spent three weeks trawling through the detritus of the last decade of my life. I threw out ten black sacks of crap – all the disappointments, all the betrayals, all the scum that gathers in the corners of a life that isn’t properly kept. It was immensely cathartic. I looked at my Spartan room and I thought that my work was done.
But it wasn’t.
I was somewhere between the rinse and the spin cycle, where the drum rocks back and forth gaining momentum for that last sickening spin. As I tumbled and crashed the last traces of my former life were thrashed from me. Still giddy, I now feel I have come to the end of the process. It has taken ten months, but I am at last packing up in tissue paper the neatly pressed remnants of that life. Layer upon gossamer layer, garments are being prepared for long term storage. I won’t need them again in this lifetime.
