I just did a strangely therapeutic thing. I threw away my yearbooks. All of them. Every year from kindergarten to high school. The entire stack hit the trash bin with a mighty thud. I expected to feel a pang of regret, but it never came. Instead, I felt a great relief as several burdens lifted from my shoulders.

The physical burden was obvious.

My wife and I moved a lot during the first decade of our relationship, most of it work-related. We’ve done regional moves, cross-country moves, and international moves. On average, we moved about twice per year, which taught us to loathe many of our possessions.

You know what sucks? Moving heavy crap from one place to another. You know what really sucks? Moving heavy crap that you never use from one place to another.

We moved so often that we decided to implement some rules to make our transitions easier. First, we decided to own nothing that couldn’t be moved by a single person. No more sleeper sofas, only chairs and sectionals. Second, we invested in reusable bins to eliminate the hunt for cardboard boxes. That alone significantly reduced the headaches. And third, we resolved to chuck or donate any non-seasonal item that we hadn’t touched in three months. But for some reason, certain items enjoyed immunity from that rule, like yearbooks.

The mental burden was less obvious.

I have never been one to dwell on the past. I like to try new things, gain experience, learn from mistakes, and apply those lessons to new adventures. I am always looking forward to the next chapter, the next goal, whatever, as long as it’s next. This isn’t to say that I’m blind to the past. I just extract the useful bits and move on.

My yearbooks, on the other hand, were acting like mental anchors.

I was taught growing up that nostalgia matters. You’ll want to relive those early love letters. You’ll want to revisit those old vacation pictures. You’ll want to recapture youth by flipping through yearbooks. I’m now pushing 40 and you know what I never want to do? Any of those things. And yet, I lug boxes of this crap from place to place, having never looked at any of it for more than a few seconds.

I was done carrying around the past.

So I trashed it all, including a dusty stack of old yearbooks.

I even took a few minutes to glance through them, wondering how I would feel. Much to my non-surprise, I didn’t feel anything. I read notes and browsed pictures, all linked to people in my distant past. To be honest, it felt like snooping inside the life of a different person. And in a sense, I was. I’m not that person anymore, so why carry the baggage?

That’s when I thought about Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite, the ultimate man-child. I went to a small-town high school where everybody married each other after graduation. I was one of the lucky few who escaped, opting to explore the world and expand my horizon. Every year, that town gets smaller and smaller. And yet, the relics get heavier and heavier. I realized that in order to make room for new experiences, I needed to shed the dead weight.

In doing so, I freed up so much more than closet space. I gave myself permission to drop the mental anchor and sail into the great unknown. The me of today is the me that matters most, so that’s who I’m going to focus on from here on out.