As a kid, I kept everything. Literally everything. Maps and pamphlets from places I visited, various bits of string, rocks I found, any card anyone ever gave me, crappy miniature clay models of food I made once, the list goes on. Like probably everyone, by the time I reached adulthood, I was drowning in objects, more things than were sustainable or practical.

I can’t say if I fit the description of a real hoarder per se, but when faced with the prospect of throwing a thing out or giving it away, every memory that this insignificant bit of paraphernalia and I shared would threaten my brain with disappearing forever if I threw that thing out. That horrified me, as if I were some kind of weird child-creature who apparently subsisted on sentimentality and Oreos. So I kept stuff.

The first time my family moved, I remember my mom remarking to someone that she had once thought I was the neatest and most organized child she had but found out I was actually the opposite, because I had so much stuff crammed into every nook and cranny of my room. My room was actually a chaotic, deeply stacked disaster; I just hid it very neatly, in drawers or boxes or under the bed or wherever stuff could fit out of sight.

Over the next decade, my family proceeded to move so many times I lost count. At first, every move was accompanied by fights over the sheer amount of boxes of stuff that I had that I never looked at or touched, let alone used, save for the panic attack it would cost me to throw it out. Couldn’t I get rid of some of it? My mom would plead. I would stand firm. Being a white, vaguely middle-class person in the modern day, consumerism ran unchecked, and I acquired yet more stuff.

Later on, the moves involved my own exasperation with the physical burden of dealing with all my stuff—packing it, unpacking it, toting it from floor to floor, room to van to room, realizing I had nowhere to put it because dedicating a spot to it would involve wanting to look at or use it on a daily basis and then haphazardly returning it to a box or putting it on a shelf or in a drawer until a year or so later it came time to move again. Little did I know my problem was not having too many things that were important to me, but having no clue how to define an important thing or how to let go of anything.

I bided my time, lugging my meaningfully meaningless stuff until about the time my disposable income and the cost of getting into digital photography crossed paths. Anything I had to lose but couldn’t bear to see it go, I’d take a photo of. This turned out to be a somewhat imperfect system, due to an underdeveloped backup situation on my earliest computers. I lost quite a bit to a certain fried Dell motherboard.

But when my personal brood of objects started to separate from my family’s, I really felt the need to get it under control. I had to find a way to cope with my impractical feelings of attachment to stuff I wouldn’t need again, so I made a decision: rather than part with only the least significant of items, I was going to get rid of nearly everything I didn’t use regularly. No mementos, no collections.

This left a lot of stuff to get rid of, so I started taking photos with my phone and storing them in Evernote. Like that, I was freed from the need-to-see-it-so-I-remember compulsion. I started a separate notebook for these photos and keep them there (they’re also backed up locally) and to record memories related to those objects or as their own standalone notes.

Now, a lot of the things I lugged around for years live there, like the angel figurine in a yellow dress my dad gave me when I was some single-digit age. The wings were broken off long ago, so I couldn’t display it, but I couldn’t just throw it away. Now it exists only in Evernote, but still in as complete of a form as I need it to.

I’ve always been attached to the platonic idea of an attic, where traditional families who live in the same house for forever stick their prized possessions and junk, so that other family members can go up and trawl through it at watershed points in their lives to discover some curio that leads them to a cave under a seasonal restaurant that contains a fully intact 18th-century pirate ship.

This concept of an attic didn’t fit with my family’s life for obvious reasons. But as I’ve moved around and learned, at least corporeally, to let go of stuff, the attic has started to turn out to be in a corner of my cloud storage.

It may not be precisely the same thing as a true attic, but as far as “a place to put things you’re strangely and irredeemably sentimental about,” it works pretty well. And as far as trawling through the contents, what with tags and descriptions, I can make it as much like a neatly cataloged, professionally organized closet or a mishmashed haunted top floor of a Southern Gothic mansion as I like.

Yes, cue the lessons about how my real home was the Internet all along. There’s enough information that mindful consuming is good, not just personally, but in a lot of ways. And with so much moving, it’s even clearer that having too many things negatively affects one's quality of life. I have the Internet to thank for letting me make most of my stuff less, well, stuff-like, such that it only exists in the ways I need it to—as a distilled, concentrated memory.

Listing image by trpultz