Shallow profundities

Feeling slightly better about life. Slightly. I'm horribly tired, which is probably accounting for much of my crabbiness. And I'm going back and wading through more books, which may or may not make me feel accomplished.

Anyway, a few epiphanies:

I am who I am. (Yeah, I know, not a huge surprise.) But it also means that all my life I've gotten carried away by things that I will later change my mind about. Beating myself up over that now will neither solve anything nor change my fundamental nature. Trying to change my nature will be both futile and REALLY depressing instead of the moderate shade of azure I've spent the last day in.

I like what I like, although the outward expression of it may shift over time. For instance, I will always sew. I learned to do competition costumes, which I may or may not ever do again - but I still *sew* - quilts, toys, garb. I will always read voraciously, I will always enjoy research, and I will be a fan to the day I die.

So it's probably no huge surprise that the three biggest stacks o' crap that I'm wading through now are books, fabrics, and fanzines.

Now, given that I will always be getting more books, fabrics, and fanzines, and that there will always be some churn of new ideas displacing old projects that I change my mind about, the point is not to beat myself up about what I've done in the past, the points are to productively pass on what I don't want and to try to keep the churn and backlog down into something that is economically and logistically sustainable.

For fanzines, this means... well, bloody nothing. Zines either are or aren't available, and they are or aren't reasonably priced. It's not like there's really a buyer's market out there. Since I still prefer reading in print than wading through/printing out internet fic, I'm simply going to have to accept that I (and every other zine-buying fan) will buy zines I turn out not to like and to hope that they'll fetch a decent price on ebay.

For fabric, it means that I must decide soonish if I will ever compete again - and if not, to find a use for the glitzy, unnatural fiber fabrics that are left over from those days. It means combing through my quilt fabrics, and deciding to give anything I don't love anymore to the wenches working the Linus Project and to not get mad at myself about that. It means going through the garb/street fabrics I have and making a pledge to do something about sewing them up - *but not this year.* It also means that when I break down and look for more fabrics, I should start at the discount outlets so that I won't feel bad about the price should I decide later in life to dump whatever great new project I went out buying for.

For books, it also means discount shopping, and thinking of what I paid for books vs what is written on the cover. Many of the books I'm donating now I got second hand, half price, sometimes even free; getting rid of them counts legitimately as decluttering instead of throwing money away. I need to remind myself of that, and to remind myself that the number of unread/disliked books that I paid full price for is actually a very low percentage of the items in the donation boxes.

So what I really need to do in future, rather than try to do a personality makeover, is to ask myself these things when I'm about to get another book/zine/yard of fabric:

1) Do I love it? Not just want it, but love it?
2) Is my backlog of that sort of thing already unsustainably large? (ie - am I going to have to throw it out next time I declutter?)
3) Is it discounted so that if I do toss it next time I declutter I'm not throwing away a lot of money?
4) Is there somewhere useful for it to go if I decide I don't want it after all? (ie - does it have legitimate charitable/resale/regift value?)