The Cartons

On being a gatherer, and what a reframe won't do

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

There are more than a dozen of them, in corners of my garage now, moved down from the attic bedroom when I cleared the space for my grandchildren to play.

Inside are decades of things I thought were worth keeping. Notes, ideas, scraps of writing. Things that caught my attention and made me think, there’s something in this. All mixed together.

For years I have been ashamed of them. Not dramatically. Just that small inward flinch — the feeling that a more organised person would have sorted them by now. That a woman who really had her life together wouldn’t have twelve cartons of thoughts she once considered important and can no longer find.

I kept the lids on. Literally, and in other ways. I didn’t talk about the cartons much.

Shame likes that. It likes things unnamed and out of sight, because once you say something aloud you can start to look at it properly.

And lately I have been looking differently. Not sorting them — let’s not get carried away. Looking.

Because what is actually in there? Yes, disorder. But something else too. Decades of noticing. A thought I didn’t want to lose. A connection I wanted to come back to. A question, a phrase, something I saw that seemed to belong with something else.

I used to look at the cartons and see evidence that I was messy. Now I can also see the mind that filled them. A mind that gathered. A mind that kept saying, this might matter one day.

Perhaps some of it did. Perhaps some of it still does.

There is kindness for me in seeing that. But my hard head has something to say too.

The cartons are not evidence that I am a failure. And they are not particularly useful sitting in corners of the garage unsorted. Calling myself a gatherer does not create an index. A beautiful reframe will not help me find the piece of paper I am looking for.

There is a difference between refusing to shame ourselves for the way we are wired and refusing to take responsibility for what our way of being creates. I am still learning that difference.

The soft heart says: of course you kept things. You were interested. You were curious. You saw connections everywhere. You were gathering pieces of a life.

The hard head says: yes. And perhaps it is time to see what you gathered. Not because the cartons are shameful — because they might contain something worth finding.

I haven’t sorted them yet. This is not the part where I tell you I bought matching storage boxes, spent a heroic weekend with a labelling machine and emerged as a completely different woman. The cartons are still there. Still mixed. Still waiting.

But something has changed. I no longer see them quite so much as evidence against me. They are simply something I have carried. Part archive, part unfinished business, part record of a mind that kept noticing.

And I like that the room they once occupied is filled with something else now. My grandchildren playing. A new generation making a mess of its own. The old thoughts moved downstairs. Life moved in.

Perhaps the next step isn’t to condemn the woman who filled those cartons. Perhaps it is to sit beside her, open one lid, and see what she thought was worth saving.

What have you been treating as evidence against yourself that might deserve a kinder — and more honest — look?

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