The Agony of the ‘Maybe’ Pile

My knees are grinding against the hardwood of this Glasgow flat, a sound that mimics the structural fatigue of the 13 cardboard boxes stacked against the far wall. The floor is a mosaic of things that no longer fit into the narrative I’m writing for myself. In my right hand, I’m holding a chipped ceramic mug from a tech job I quit 3 years ago. It’s ugly. It has a corporate logo that’s peeling like a sunburnt shoulder. Yet, I’ve been staring at it for 23 minutes, unable to decide if it belongs in the ‘Keep’ pile or the ‘Donate’ box. This is the agony of the move. We are told moving is a logistical challenge, a matter of cubic meters and transit times, but they never mention the psychic trauma of the ‘Maybe’ pile. It’s a graveyard of intentions.

I just threw away a jar of Dijon mustard that expired in 2023. It felt like a betrayal. Not because I particularly liked the mustard, but because keeping it for the last 13 months was a silent promise to myself that I would eventually host a dinner party, the kind where people use cloth napkins and talk about architecture. Discarding the mustard is admitting that the dinner-party-version of me is dead. Or perhaps he was never born. It’s a brutal confrontation with the person I actually am-the person who eats toast over the sink at 11:03 PM-versus the person I bought the mustard for. We don’t pack objects; we pack the ghosts of who we thought we would be by now.

The Unseen Energy Drain

Hayden J.-P., a machine calibration specialist I met during a project in the Highlands, once told me that the hardest thing to account for in any system isn’t the friction of the parts, but the ‘ghost load’-the energy consumed by a machine when it’s doing absolutely nothing. Hayden is a man who deals in tolerances of 0.003 millimeters. He can tell you exactly why a turbine is vibrating, yet when he moved his own workshop last year, he spent 43 hours trying to decide whether to keep a box of rusted 19th-century clock springs. He didn’t need them. He’s a calibration specialist for industrial robotics, not a horologist. But those springs represented a version of Hayden that had the time to sit by a window and tinker with the passage of seconds. Moving forces you to look at your ghost load. It forces you to ask why you are paying to transport the physical weight of a hobby you haven’t touched in 123 weeks.

Anchors for Identity

There is a specific kind of cruelty in a university textbook. I have 23 of them. They are heavy, expensive, and smells like the anxiety of a 2013 library basement. I haven’t opened ‘Advanced Fluid Dynamics‘ since the day I took the final exam, yet the thought of leaving it behind feels like erasing the struggle I went through to understand it. This is the sunk cost fallacy manifested in 803 pages of gloss paper. If I leave the book, did I ever really learn the material? If I don’t carry the weight of my education into the next zip code, am I still an educated person? It’s absurd, of course. My brain holds the knowledge (or the lack thereof), not the paper. But objects act as anchors for our identity. When we move, we aren’t just shifting furniture; we are recalibrating our sense of self. We are deciding which anchors are still holding us to a harbor we no longer want to occupy.

Stripping Away Sentiment

It’s easier to talk about the mechanics. The bubble wrap, the tape, the way you have to brace the bottom of a box so it doesn’t give way under the pressure of 63 hardback novels. But the mechanics are a distraction. When the boxes finally need to leave the hallway, the logistical reality of Nova Parcel becomes the bridge between who I was in this flat and who I’m pretending to be in the next one. There is a strange relief when the items are finally in someone else’s hands. Suddenly, the ‘Maybe’ pile is no longer a philosophical crisis; it is simply mass. It is weight. It is volume. The professional distance of a transport service strips away the sentiment and leaves only the physical reality of the load. They don’t see the ‘Advanced Fluid Dynamics’ textbook as a symbol of my youth; they see it as a 2.3-kilogram brick. And perhaps that’s how I should have seen it all along.

Weighing Memory

I find myself wondering about the 33 items I’ve already put in the ‘Donate’ box. There’s a sweater there with a hole in the elbow that I’ve kept through 3 different moves. Why? Because I wore it on a day I felt particularly brave once. I’ve been carrying that bravery around in the form of moth-eaten wool for nearly a decade. It’s a burden. If I were as precise as Hayden J.-P., I’d see the inefficiency of this. I’d see that the bravery is a data point in my history, not a physical requirement for my future. Calibration is about removing the noise to find the signal. Moving is the ultimate calibration of a human life. It’s the only time we are forced to weigh our memories and decide if they are worth the $133 it costs to ship them across the country.

The Final Break

I’ve decided to leave the mug. It’s currently sitting on the kitchen counter, looking lonely against the backdrop of an apartment that is slowly becoming a hollow shell. I’m leaving it for the next tenant. Maybe they’ll use it to hold pens. Maybe they’ll find a way to appreciate its corporate ugliness in a way I couldn’t. By leaving it, I’m freeing up exactly 303 cubic centimeters of space in my new life. It’s a small victory, but it’s a start. I’m learning that the person I am today doesn’t need to carry the person I was 3 years ago like a backpack full of stones. The hardest part of moving isn’t the lifting; it’s the letting go. It’s the realization that the version of me that lives in the next city doesn’t need the textbooks, the broken guitar, or the expired mustard. He just needs the room to become whoever he’s going to be next.

There is a certain dignity in an empty room. It’s a blank slate, a silence that hasn’t been filled with the clutter of ‘who I might be.’ As I tape up the final box-number 13-I realize that my piles have shifted. The ‘Maybe’ pile has been absorbed into the other two. There is no middle ground anymore. You either come with me into the future, or you stay here in the past. It’s a binary choice that feels like a clean break, a calibration of the soul that finally matches the 0.003mm precision of Hayden’s machines. I’m lighter now. Not by much, maybe only a few pounds of paper and ceramic, but the psychological weight that’s lifted is immeasurable. The floor is still cold, and the Glasgow air is still damp, but for the first time in 43 days, I can see the floor. And that, in itself, is enough to start again.