This Post Is Really About My Harry Potter Collection

So I'm home now, and I'm dutifully going through all the crap in my room to get rid of stuff per my earlier manifesto and my mother's requests. This post is sort of about cleaning/organizing, sort of about moving, sort of about living like a gypsy, sort of about priorities, and mostly about my absurd collection of Harry Potter knicknacks and utterly useless memerobilia. (I can't spell either of those words.)

The goal is to reduce my possessions to the amount of stuff that will fit in my future New York apartment. It's remarkable how much stuff I managed to cram into my desk and under my bed in high school. I don't think the Mary Poppins carpet bag was not such an imaginative thing anymore. My whole room is like that.

Essentially I'm doing half of the moving process right now. Getting rid of the stuff I don't want to haul across the country, that won't fit in my new place anyway. I started this blog post about six weeks ago and never really got back to it because I've been hard at work slimming down my life. I've found a lot of crazy things.

I donated five bags of clothes within three days of getting home. I've probably recycled my weight in paper. Every day I find at least one thing to throw in the donation bag. There's now an empty dresser in my room, space to hang things in my closet. Half of the space under my bed is empty, and the rest of it is pretty much filled with books that I cleared off of my bookshelves at my mom's request. I tossed out awards and made room on my shelves for pictures of people I care about and some art. But the big thing, as I said, is the Harry Potter stuff.

Harry Potter things I have that probably no one else has:

1. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets "art coloring book" completely uncolored.
2. Harry Potter "reaching for the golden snitch" computer accessory. It's a figuring of him that can sit on a computer monitor. I don't have a computer monitor. And this is pre-movies, so it doesn't even look like Daniel Radcliffe.
3. A Hermione Granger figurine sitting on top of a potions book that has a "secret pull-out drawer" to store all my secret treasures that fit in a 2x3 inch box.
4. Hallmark "keepsake ornament" - Hermione Granger's trunk, which inexplicably includes broomstick and cane charms to put inside in addition to a potions bottle, time turner, and book.
5. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone movie poster
6. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban movie poster (with Good Charlotte on the back?)
7. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone movie poster book
8. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets movie poster book
9. A sign that I made on the computer that says "Welcome to the chamber of Emma the Harry Potter Queen, Enjoy your stay!" (I went by Emma in sixth grade, didn't you know?)
10. A whole bunch of individual pages pulled from a magazine with pictures of the Harry Potter characters on them
11. Harry Potter postcards, formerly collected into a book.
12. A laminated page from the Chicago Tribune Sunday, November 5, 2000 with a color ad for the Harry Potter windows at Marshall Field's.
13. 2 little containers that each have three "collector stones" which are just little one inch long colored bits of plastic.
14. A page torn out of an April, 2003 issue of People magazine, announcing the birth of JK Rowling's son, David Gordon (Rowling Murray), her first with Neil Murray, husband of one year, and the reason there was a three year gap between Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix.
15. Giant Hogwarts poster.
16. Two (one laminated) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows posters from Borders.
17. Harry Potter analog wall clock (pre-movies)
18. Two pencil cases that may not be from America. They seem to have German writing on them.
19. 2003 and 2004 desk calendars
20. Harry Potter "big sticker book" - two of them, bumper sticker size
21. Temporary tattoo kit with purple(?) ink. Two different sets.
22. Stickers with house flags, other random stickers
23. An unopened set of 8 Chamber of Secrets invitations. Definitely keeping those for my next birthday party.

I've had a lot of that stuff since the late 90s, before the movies came out. But what I've realized is two things. The longer you hang onto something, the more valuable it seems to become, even if you didn't really care about it in the first place. "I've had this since I was five years old!" Yes, but do you still need it, or does it just get put back in a corner of the closet each time you clean it out? That's why I tossed out so much stuff from high school and college when I got home - to get rid of it before it can become stuff I've had forever. "I've hung onto it this long, I should keep it!" Nope.

The other thing I've come to really believe, particularly through a year of living with maybe a quarter of my possessions is that so much of the "stuff" we have is just objects to affirm who we are. I have kept all this Harry Potter stuff all these years not because I actually use it, but because it's proof that I'm the huge Potter fan that I am. But I know (as does anyone who's spent more than five minutes with me) how important Potter is in my life, what a big fan I am. I don't need stuff to prove that. Just like I didn't need the stack of awards I've accumulated over my school career to prove I'm smart, so I threw most of them away.

Today, numbers 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, half of 16, and 17 went out the door. They're going to the nine-year-old son of a former teacher of mine who saw my declaration on facebook that I didn't need this stuff anymore. For the first time in my life, I GOT RID OF HARRY POTTER MEMEROBILIA. Maybe I'm growing up, but the eight-year-old Harry Potter fan in me hasn't gone anywhere; she's just got a little more space under her bed.