I am no stranger to packing.
I'm standing in the doorway of 'my' bedroom (or what was once my bedroom when I was a child, before I wrestled the 'better' room from my little brother in middle school), which is not even 'my' bedroom really but just an Extra Room that happens to be where I sleep and put my stuff sometimes. When I went off to college in 2010 my brother was quick to reclaim the 'better' room, leaving his old room to the fate of becoming the Extra Room. What makes it Extra is that there is nobody to occupy its room-ness during most of the year, and that it is filled with Extra Things that my mom wants to keep around but that don't seem to fit anywhere else. (Once, the Extra Room was so filled with Extra Things that I slept on the futon in the living room for a week.) I don't mind the Extra Room. It's home. Plus, it has a bed that is not a futon. And although it's not my room, over the past three years it has grown to become 'my' room. At least, whenever I'm occupying it. And that's good enough for me.
So I'm standing in the doorway, looking at this,
and thinking, 'Here we go again.' It's not that I moved a lot as a kid. It's just that I'm in a perpetual state of going somewhere. Growing up, my family traveled a lot. We went on a lot of roadtrips and did a lot of camping, and I can tell you that squishing six people in one minivan for thirty days makes packing less like a vacation and more like 3D Tetris with a theme song of clattering and swearing. I was lucky enough to leave the country a few times too; over the years I've packed for Mexico a few times, Canada a couple times, and Australia and Europe once each. When my parents got divorced, the once- or twice-a-year packing became a regular thing. My brother and I began to use our school backpacks half as bookbags and half as overnight bags every other day, then every week, then every two weeks through the end of high school. When I got a car senior year, I was finally granted the long-awaited luxury of living out of my car. It was fantastic, like having a walk-in closet on wheels!
Then college happened and, well, nobody stays in one place for very long during college.
I've spent the last week going through all of my belongings, the total of which fit into two carloads of my little yellow hatchback. Now that I've pilfered through it all and come up with a sizeable donation pile, I think I could fit my whole life into one carload-- that is, if I gave up my shoe collection. But what I'm about to do is even more exciting. I have to fit my whole life into two carry-ons. I don't even get a checked bag, because let's be real, traveling should be as hardcore and as deprived as possible. Everything I can't live without for an entire year studying abroad in England has to fit into one 24"x16"x10" suitcase and one 18"x14"x8" backpack. At least I can buy shampoo when I get there.
And thanks to all my previous packing experience, I've had plenty of practice making dimensionally-solid luggage items magically bigger on the inside. But I like to think of it less as an inconvenience and more as a challenge. I'm imagining it as one of those invasive reality gameshows: Can this 20-year-old California girl Tetris her entire lifestyle into just two carry-on items? Will she make it past customs, or will she waste all her college loans on overweight baggage fees? Tune in next month to find out!
Meanwhile, I'll be turning
this:
into this:
and trying not to go insane due to an overload of travel information, schedule planning, watching my bank account trickle into nothingness, and summer heat. I'll let you know how that goes.
P.S. For anyone else out there having trouble packing for a trip, here are some nifty articles that helped me get started and not want to curl up in a corner and cry quite as much:
