Over the winter break I endeavored to work on a project that had been on my to-do list for more years than I care to count: cleaning out my home office.  Over dinner one night a few weeks earlier I was chatting with several friends who primarily work from home.  They were astounded to learn that I typically work from my local grocery store food court when I have an entire room in my home called an “office”!  “It isn’t functional,” I revealed.

And that was quite true.  Never a fan of vertical filing and possessing just enough of the hoarding gene to be of danger to myself and others, I had moved all my “officey” things into the room when we moved into the house and promptly put blinders on and ignored the entire space.  I won’t tell you how long we’ve lived here…

Because the good news is I have finally started to tackle it.  Only an hour a day, usually 3 or 4 days a week, I have started to chip away at the dusty remnants of my Ph.D. program (who needs 17 drafts of her dissertation when she has one that passed) and appliance service manuals for items we have long ago hauled away!

As to the title of this post, I am not really “outing” myself as a reluctant hoarder…but rather as an activist for women’s causes, in general, and reproductive rights, in particular.  In one corner of the room I had stored over a dozen protest signs and posters that I figured could be useful in the future:

But I realized that these are vintage posters and I do not “collect” things like this.  For the next protest rally I participate in there are sure to be new logos, new slogans, new chants.  I can thank these posters for the joy they brought me and recycle them next week.  I put them here as a permanent reminder of my values and my new-found decision to get rid of what I do not really need.