Everyone goes through breakups. It’s one of those unavoidable facts of life. I have never perceived a breakup as a negative event, although I’m sure many people do. I have always seen them as opportunities to move on down a different avenue in your own life and learn things about yourself you’d never have thought of otherwise. I actually feel a little sorry for those that have never experienced a breakup as to me it’s part of what shapes us as people. Then again, that’s only my opinion!
My last breakup came at a very awkward time. I was out of work and pushing my own production company as well as scribbling my embryonic ideas to paper in an attempt to start on my route to writing as a career. I was living on savings and I was living with the person when we mutually decided it was time to move on. There is a deeply emotional side to splitting up with a partner and that’s always hard to deal with in the short term (and my answer to that was to pack my bags and fly to New York for a few months) but to me the biggest challenge has always been the physical logistics of moving out of a shared flat.
As I was making travel plans to get away from the situations I was soon to leave behind, I was faced with a plethora of practical issues as I owned a lot of the bigger furniture and silly fiddly bits of home like kitchen bits and bobs as well as my wardrobe which is an entity unto itself. Of course, I couldn’t pack it all up and take it with me to the States, so after a failed attempt to sell some of it, I had to bite the bullet and consider self storage.
Self storage, to those that are fortunate enough to claim ignorance to it, is basically a large, dark, cold, florescently lit warehouse space divided into ‘units’ which one can rent for a (not inconsiderable) fee. There has been much press coverage of late exemplifying individuals who have hired these spaces on a professional basis, using them as dance studio’s, offices, music rooms or the like. I envy those people as they don’t really need to deal with the primary reason one usually hires a unit: to store your accumulated ‘life crap’.
‘Life crap’ is far worse than your common house or garden level of crap. It’s stuff. Stuff which has been lying around for weeks, months, years even, that you have rarely seen, taken notice of or touched since you bought it. Either that or it’s the endless pile of necessary technologies, implements and objects that are required to stop oneself from slipping back into the middle ages.
During a breakup you are too full of emotion, plans, ideas and arguments to consider anything like ‘life crap’ as anything other than piles of inanimate obstacles to moving on with your life. I had this mindset myself and hastily packed away my belongings in order to speed up my departure from the UK. I managed to get pretty much everything into a ridiculously small space and, although slightly saddened by facing the fact I had to leave my entire life behind in order to move on with it, I locked the bright yellow metal door and happily tucked the key in my pocket, sauntering away. Done. Sorted. Fab.
This morning was a strange morning. I had arranged to return to my self storage unit to pick up a couple of suits for an interview on Tuesday. I had been driven there and it was the first time I’d returning to my stuff since I’d locked the door almost six months ago. I was totally fine with the journey and rather enjoyed the sun beating in through the window as I flew through Brent Cross. On taking a step into my corridor (where my particular yellow door was situated) I felt a sudden chill. It wasn’t particularly cold outside so it must have been me. I stepped slowly towards my door, took a breath and opened it slowly. There before me was my life again. My stuff. My ‘life crap’. Sofa, chairs, piano, boxes, bags and all manner of homely objects facing me sadly. This was the life I’d left behind and never faced until now. It was a chilling metaphor for me to be faced with a physical manifestation of ones own psyche; a jumble of bits and bobs propped up against each other, all as they were when I last saw them.
I had a job to do so I rooted around and eventually managed to pull the relevant things from the pile and placed them into my suitcase to return to the real world with. It was strange though. It didn’t feel like my belongings. There was a morbid air of looking at the belongings of someone now dead. It didn’t help that the air temperature in the units was fairly chilly as well. It then occurred to me, the person who all this belonged to was indeed dead. Me, who I was, had died when I placed everything in the warehouse. I was a boyfriend, a tenant, a nester and a writer in the early stages. All were no longer part of who I was. It really gave me a strange feeling. I still don’t think I can articulate it. Now there’s a thing!
As I closed the big yellow door once more, taking a last lingering look at my stuff slowly relegated to darkness once again for an indefinite stretch of time, I had leant something. I had learnt that running away from things doesn’t do anything other than delay dealing with the problems you are running away from. Whether it’s ‘life crap’, emotions, people or yourself, you need to take the time to ease away from it gently. Otherwise you’ll find that what you’ve left behind is a chilling reminder of what may never be again.
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