Not the aforementioned important post

Clear-cutting my material life tonight which is good in that I'll have even more space to stay organized and bad in that I realized at a certain point I was up in my room alone muttering to myself as I threw away many of my possessions. Like, you know. A crazy person.

It's stupid, though, because if I didn't wear it then, I'm not going to wear it now and I should stop dressing the way that I do and buy sensible slacks and many of my clothes do not even close to fit and really, having worn the red dress to a party once in college and not a very happy party at that does not a keepsake make and the beautiful picture isn't going to stop having bad associations and to be very honest I never liked it much anyway. There are so many things I still possess that I have no right to possess as a moderately adjusted nonpackrat vaguely organized 25 year old, and it makes me feel very stupid.

I think I'm just having one of those weird nights of doubt and loathing, wherein, for example, I think obsessively about all the nice things friends and teachers have written for me in books they've signed and how I'll never come to deserve any of them. People do that when you're a writer and eventually you have friends or teachers who publish; it's a thing. My favorite one I just found, in a book written by a very, very dear professor from undergrad--she'd signed the title page and left the inscription "Jess, always keep this in mind: you are one of the best writers out there." I loved it because it felt like such a unrestrained, absolute endorsement and almost clumsy or unbelievable in its extremity. An insincere compliment is dispiriting, but every now and then in life, you run into a person who for whatever reason likes you enough to be raw about it, and I genuinely believe she meant it. I sort of took a lesson from that lack of restraint. Even if I kind of ruefully sit here now and think gloomy thoughts about it not being objectively true, maybe it should be enough that one person believed in me that much. 

Some good news, though? Don't worry; I just found my M*A*S*H t-shirt.