Letting Go of What I Kept to Prove I Was Here
On Hoarding Knowledge, Preparing for Collapse, and Learning to Live Anyway
I threw away a stack of research articles this week.
Printed-out PDFs from my undergraduate psych degree—fifteen years old, ink faded, margins filled with highlights and commentary like I was writing a secret book no one would read but me.
I hadn’t looked at them in over a decade. But I moved them from apartment to apartment, city to city, shelf to box to shelf again—because they felt like proof. Not of the diploma I earned, but of the effort. Of the nights I stayed up trying to understand. Of the version of me who thought that if I could just gather enough knowledge, I could prepare myself out of pain.
They weren’t just papers. They were talismans. Ritual objects from the church of hyper-responsibility.
And this week, I let them go.
I used to think I was just an over-preparer.
The kind of person who backs up the backup hard drive. Who keeps a folder of research articles “just in case,” another folder for “future inspiration,” and a mental catalog of every herbal remedy I might need in the event of famine, societal collapse, or one more cracked open moment of existential dread.
I called it being resourceful. Responsible. Thorough. But really, I was building an archive of my own survival.
There’s a very specific kind of nervous system that believes salvation lies in preparedness.
It says: Don’t throw that away. What if you need it later?
It whispers: You can’t afford to forget.
And it builds shrines out of information, resources, data, screenshots, emergency plans, and craft supplies that could—if the apocalypse comes—be converted into tools of survival.
I used to think this impulse came from being a high achiever. But now I see it for what it is: a grief ritual.
A desperate attempt to preserve what I thought I could not bear to lose—myself, my worth, my place in the world.
I wasn’t preparing for success.
I was preparing for loss.
The roots run deep: The Origins
This kind of archival living has roots. Sometimes it grows from religious end-times conditioning—where the world could collapse at any moment and your only job is to be found ready. Sometimes from chronic anticipatory anxiety, where the body braces for impact before anything has even gone wrong. Sometimes from the trauma of erasure, where your identity was made invisible unless you could prove it with evidence. And sometimes from the quiet indoctrination that your worth is tied to how much you can salvage, fix, foresee.
We become keepers of the record because no one else bore witness.
When you grow up inside systems that center catastrophe—religious, familial, cultural—you learn that safety is conditional. That the world might end at any moment. That your belonging might evaporate if you say the wrong thing, believe the wrong thing, feel too much, or stop proving your worth.
In high-control religion, they call it readiness.
In trauma recovery, we call it hypervigilance.
In everyday life, we call it “being prepared.”
But for many of us, it was a silent ritual of grief. A way to brace against disappearance, meaninglessness, or unworthiness.
So we learned to collect and store: Knowledge. Quotes. PDFs. Insight. Strategies. Craft scraps. Skills. Memories. Versions of ourselves. Anything that might help us stay intact when the next collapse came.
Even after the collapse never arrived and even after I accepted that I didn’t need to prepare for it, I still lived like it might. My nervous system was acclimated to the threat.
Performing Safety: The logic of preparedness
This isn’t about being overly organized. It’s about the logic your nervous system built when it didn’t feel safe to trust the present moment.
I saved things to protect myself from not knowing.
I archived because I feared erasure.
I hoarded information like a talisman—proof that I had enough to withstand whatever came next.
And I believed—deeply—that if I just prepared enough, I could outrun the ache of being unprepared.
But the cost of that belief is constant tension.
You never get to arrive, because you’re always preparing to leave.
You never get to rest, because the second you relax, you fear it’ll all fall apart.
There’s a performance we take on—of being prepared, organized, resourceful, even wise. But beneath it is fear. If I don’t keep this, I might forget. If I don’t remember, I might disappear. If I’m not prepared, I won’t be worthy of saving.
What we call being “on top of things” is often a coping strategy in disguise. Our storage systems are shrines. Our folders are fortress walls.
But maybe we don’t need to perform safety anymore.
Maybe we can live it.
The Shift
Letting go of a stack of old research articles shouldn’t have felt like a spiritual experience. But it did.
Because it wasn’t about the paper.
It was about loosening the grip.
I didn’t need those articles anymore. I’m not the person who wrote in their margins at 2AM trying to make sense of the world through someone else’s citations.
But I was her once. And she worked so hard to survive.
She archived. She prepped. She highlighted. She tried.
And today, I thanked her—and let her files go.
Because now I understand:
Presence is safer than preparedness.
My life is real even if it’s not archived in five formats.
Safety isn’t built by collecting proof, but by choosing to belong to yourself in real time.
Letting it go doesn’t mean I am closer to the unknown chaos I perceive could be looming in the distance. It doesn’t mean I am closer to the pain I’m trying to outsmart.
I’m learning now that presence is safer than preparedness. That I don’t need to archive every moment of my life to prove it happened. That my value is not in the notes I took, the files I saved, the contingency plans I perfected—but in my actual, lived presence here and now.
Letting go of those papers wasn’t a rejection of my learning.
It was a release of the fear that said I had to hold it all in order to be whole.
Choosing to not out prepare pain, but be willing to trust that I can meet it when and if it comes way was my brave first step into being with who I am now.
And somehow, the moment they left my hands, I didn’t feel empty.
I felt a little more free.
The Practice
This isn’t a sudden purge. It’s a slow unlearning.
I still save too many things “just in case.”
I still screenshot ideas I’m scared to forget.
I still have a hard time deleting anything that once felt sacred.
But I’m learning to notice the part of me that equates preparedness with safety.
And instead of silencing her, I sit with her.
I say: “Thank you for trying to protect me. I’m allowed to rest now.”
This is the work of healing the gap between vigilance and vitality.
It’s not about throwing everything away.
It’s about trusting that I’ll know what I need when I get there.
I’ll probably always feel the tug to save things. To screenshot that quote. To bookmark that article. To copy that recipe in case the internet breaks. I’ll probably keep extra batteries and backup drives and two types of password protectors.
But I’m starting to believe that I don’t need to hoard proof of my existence to matter.
I’m starting to believe that the life I live now is enough.
That I can stop bracing for the collapse.
And start trusting in my becoming.
Because healing is learning to live—not just in spite of what might be lost,
but in honor of what is already here.
If you’ve been archiving your way through life—hoarding knowledge, planning for collapse, trying to stay one step ahead of pain—I see you.
Maybe your folders and backups and saved reels aren’t clutter.
Maybe they’re a record of how deeply you’ve tried to matter.
To stay ready. To not disappear.
But you don’t have to perform safety anymore.
You get to live it.
One small release at a time.
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Brilliant article, thank you so much. I have book-marked it, just in case I need to refer to it again!