I’ve moved a lot throughout my life. From San Diego to Bayonne, from Bayonne to Fair Lawn, from Fair Lawn to New Paltz, from New Paltz to Madrid, and soon I’ll be moving from New Paltz to New York City. This has taught me a lot about what material items I value most; the things that truly depress me to live without.

In my past apartments, I made decorating in order to claim whatever space I was inhabiting via my personal style an essential task. Incense holders and my gargantuan The Smiths poster were things that I felt grounded me to the room I was living in. But with my new landlord’s stance on hanging up posters and having open flames in the apartment ($500 fee and an automatic loss on my security deposit), those things quickly became non-essential parts of my decorating habits.

Excuse the sheet-less bed, it was laundry day.

Looking at my current room, it’s very easy to see what means a lot to me. My bass stands proudly upright next to my record player, my vinyl copy of Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain prominently displayed on my tiny mantel.

Basically, you can see how little I have to work with. My record collection is measly, my taste in clothes has been refined throughout the years, and I realized it was NOT worth the effort to bring my personal library up to New Paltz when I moved in for the Fall ’16 semester (finally admitting to myself that leisure reading was not going to be a real possibility during my last year of undergrad).

Nonetheless, it was clear to me that going through my record collection would probably elicit the most joy as well as internal conflict if I were to adopt KonMari’s method.

Right at the front of my humble little milk crate was my 7″ version of New Order’s “Temptation”.

“Duh, I’m going to want to keep this,” I said to myself. But then it occurred to me that this record made me happy because I love the song and think it’s an amazingly rare find for my collection, but the person who gave it to me is currently blocked on all fronts (phone, Facebook, Tumblr, you name it). Did I really want to hold on to something that was given to me by a an ex-boyfriend who ended up detesting me? Well, yeah, because it’s a great piece of media to own as far as bragging rights go. But maybe that’s because I’m valuing the material object over the personal history associated with it.

I continued to trifle through my collection.

Fugazi? Keep. Pixies? Keep. WHY?? Keep. Unknown Mortal Orchestra? Eh. Maybe not. The Grateful Dead? Please, I’m over that hippie bullshit.

Suddenly, the record that I knew would trip me up the most came to the front. It was Palehound’s Dry Food. I ran my fingers over the small note that the front-woman had scrawled onto the cover at my ex-girlfriend’s request. She had seen the band perform in Brussels, where she lived, and brought it on her trip to come and visit me in Madrid. I hold no animosity against her, and we only broke up due to logistical reasons, but it still gives me such a pang of melancholy when I listen to it and the song “Seekonk” comes on.

I decided to keep it, anyway.

This is where I find KonMari’s method to be flawed, because it does not account for the many emotions that can be entangled within a memory. Would I be better off  having never met either of my exes, without ever having the opportunity to be loved by someone enough that they track down my favorite song on a 7″ record and have it shipped to me from Iceland? Or fly to a different country to give me a vinyl of one of my favorite bands? It stings knowing that things often don’t work out, but at the same time these records are tokens of proof that I’m a lovable person, and that in itself makes me happy although neither of my relationships were instances of infallible love in the end.

This exercise was interesting though, because I realized that even when I allowed things like nostalgia and sentimentality to be integrated into my decision-making process, it became clear that I really had outgrown a lot of my records. For reference, the first picture is of the records I decided I would absolutely need to keep, while the second picture is of those that I feel anywhere between “eh” and “ugh” about:

But this also might just be a lesson in why I shouldn’t let my romantic partners buy me vinyl.