My Past in Shreds

I've spent the last couple of days shredding my life. No I haven't fallen into a bout of depression or anything. I finally decided to clean up my front bedroom/computer room. I can only stand mess for so long, before I get sick of it and make the time to clean it up.
This front room has been accumulating junk and stacks of old bills and receipts for the past several years. Got bad enough that I could hardly walk into the room, couldn't close the closet door, couldn't see the six foot long couch because it was stacked a foot high with papers.
I'm a bit of a pack rat by genetics. My parents were never very good about throwing things out and the same mentality seems to be in my blood. Never know when you might need this or that. Better keep it 'cause it might come in handy later... and a thousand other excuses...all adds up to a big pile of junk that I can't find anything in even if I did need it.
I finally decided that I could really part with that electric bill from 1998 and the cell phone bill from 2002. Went to Office Depot, bought a few bankers boxes and a large paper shredder and set about to attacking the mess.
It's funny how the littlest things mark times in your life both good and bad. I had a couple of big boxes of stuff from my days in support, old ISA sound cards, 10 base-2 BNC network cards, boxes of 3.5" floppy disks (Win95 on floppy anyone?) and a bunch of other junk that is obsolete.
Digging deeper I find artifacts from my days in college, even deeper I find high school year books. Even found old cassette tapes with "mixes" I'd made as a young skateboarding kid.
I pitched a lot of the junk but pulled out a lot of the stuff that had more meaning like a couple of audio tapes when a couple of my friends and I tried to make a punk band in the basement, photographs and yearbooks. Stuff that has real sentimental value and is irreplaceable.
Then I tried to unearth the couch. Literally buried under a foot deep of old bills and paper is a old brown hide-a-bed couch. Decided to filter out all the bank statements, mortgage statements, and other financial documents and file them away in the bankers boxes all neatly organized. Just in case I get audited I suppose. I feed the rest to the shredder.
Into the shredder go old credit card statements, electric and phone bills...tons of shopping receipts and other crap that doesn't serve a purpose any more. Looking through all these papers stirs up more memories. I can mark the highs and lows through my life just my following my paper trail. Feed it all to the shredder. My past in shreds.
This year marks the first year of my adult life that I'm finally debt free. I've paid off my mortgage and credit cards. My vehicle has been paid off for years. I'm finally saving some money. There is something liberating and refreshing about shredding a bunch of old credit card statements and "payment overdue" notices. Feel a bit like the butterfly emerging from the cocoon. Starting new. Re-born.