Cleaning clutter makes more clutter

I feel like every time I try to clean my room, it stays at the same level of mess that it was from the start.

For the last 2 months, I've been living at home with my parents, commuting to work in the same city as my mom's work. My room has been my room for 22 years, and needless to say has filled up with 22 years worth of stuff.

I've identified some slightly pack-rat habits I've developed over the years: "memory-boxes" that I fill with memorabilia that I believe will help me remember certain times of my life; collection of things I "might use in the future" such as purses, clothes, picture frames, and posters of bands I don't like anymore; and, worst of all, the collection of school work and extra curricular memorabilia from kindergarten to senior year of high school.

The whole nightmare of cleaning out my childhood room has stemmed from these three habits plus my undying feeling of losing my childhood memories through throwing things away. A lot of the things I've found I've been able to toss or donate (mostly donate) without a second thought. However, it takes hours and hours to go through the things that I believe I should thoroughly look at, due to it all being priceless. I drew a LOT as a child, so there are plenty of drawings of flowers and my family (among other artistic endeavors) boxed up in a single box. Well, I need to make room in that box for other school work, now. I'm determined to get all of it into one box for elementary as well as high school. So, the pressing nature of this project is upon me while at the same time I need to make absolutely sure about throwing things away. You can see my dilemma.

My solution? Taking pictures of artwork. Pictures take up little space (even when printed), much less than my actual drawings do. Most of the things I now have are things that I wrote as a child. Some of it's kind of hilarious if I do say so myself :D

This is just one pungent example of how this process has been going. I can already see the floor a little in one side of my room, and I've been able to move more things into my closet space. However, there are still a lot of things to look through and get rid of.... So clutter will make more clutter for a little while longer. Maybe someday before Christmas I will have everything sorted out.