Thank you everybody. There is so much to respond to and I will do so over the next few days .I am on my cell and I hate typing on my cell.
But already so much more clarity!
Elsi. I had never heard the term sunk costs. I looked it up. Yes.
There are losses in life that cannot be recouped. They are to be accepted and dealt with in one way or another. Written off. Redeemed. Acknowledged. Or carried forward.
Analysis is required. About ones course. So as to not sink deeper.
Each of these dispositions/decisions if about oneself, the inventory of self, the assets and liabilities of a life, at best involves conscious choice, processing and awareness that there is self definition involved in what is accrued, let go, maintained In the balance sheet that is a life.
I have been thinking lately about alchemy.
How one thing is transmuted into another by an intentional chemical process that is not science but not accidental or serendipity. The changing is intended and planned but at the same time magical and wondrous. Something wonderful is created out of nothing. (I will now go look it up and get back to you.)
But what I want to say first is this: what do I want to create? ((From this clearing out, rearranging, letting go, weeding...)
And the answer I come up with is: myself.
What will be left, what will emerge, what will become, be transformed, transmuted is me.
Which is what happens to people on this board who keep posting over years.
So. Where do I go with this?
Self forgiveness.
The declaration I am enough.
That I live from my own center, according to my needs and values and the greater good of all.
And that my choices from here on out make sense in terms of my life story, with the past and the end.
This is what the buying has given me. It was never about the stuff. I was seeking a center. My own. The stuff is neither here nor there. What I paid for I got. A self. It matters not one whit what goes or stays. I have realized the value that I needed from the transaction.
And that is the transmutation, the alchemy. I was none of those things when my mother died. Not conscious of my needs. Nor of my boundaries. Nor of my center. I was missing pieces and parts. Mostly a mother I never had and desperately needed. And i could never acknowledge fully until now, the pain and loneliness of that lack. With the stuff I piece by piece fleshed out this emptiness and salved it's pain. Click by click
And that was the transmutation.
Instead of shame at the stuff, the leaking out of unacknowledged need and want and lack, hurt and vulnerability there is gratitude, even glory and pride in a sense of myself.
Thank you people.