Clean out your room before a move and you’ll find a version of you in every drawer. Keep a few. Donate most.

Drawers keep versions of you that your memory has already let go of. The ticket, the lanyard, the notebook with four pages used: each one restores a whole period in a second. Keeping all of it means carrying it for the next ten years. Keeping none means losing the thread entirely.

Set a limit before you start: one box, not a pile of boxes. Photograph the things you want the memory of but not the object. Then give away the rest while you are still in the mood, because it gets much harder once it is packed.