Now that my husband is working from home full-time and he's moved his stuff to his man cave downstairs, I asked him the other day if he was going to empty the bottom drawer of one of the two filing cabinets that makes up my desk.  He replied, "Oh, that's not my stuff.  That's a bunch of your old grad school stuff."

He was right.

Obviously, I don't need it if I never knew I had it, right? I'd recycled almost everything related to my dissertation a few years ago. So I sorted through the drawer of folders and notebooks and tossed everything I didn't want or that brought back bad memories. But I was surprised how much I wanted to keep. It was a time of growth and exploration. I especially loved my Milton class and I had great fun with a project I did for a Renaissance Lyric Poetry class. I was also surprised that I wrote with such liveliness. My academic papers rarely sounded academic. I'm surprised my professors let me get away with that! I'm also surprised how much I trusted them - I looked through notes and things and found I was very open with them about my intellectual struggles.

Looking through drafts of seminar papers and pages of notes felt like meeting someone I used to know, only the someone was me.