The Art of Letting Go

As a lover of vintage style, I constantly live with the contradiction between holding on to things and letting them go. Having moved house more than ten times, I know what it means to carry your belongings from one place to another. Books and magazines in particular are so heavy that, after the exhaustion sets in, you start to question whether you should keep everything—and gradually, you learn to let go. I suppose the same happens with memories.

Moving has taught me, from a very young age, the meaning of detachment from material things, because something always gets lost along the way. In one move, my family lost our photo albums; in another, my journals; in another, my childhood toys; and in another, our books. As someone who’s passionate about memories, I miss all those things—but what can I do? “Life gives and takes,” as they say. Truth be told, sometimes I wish I were the kind of person who keeps every photograph of their ancestors, just to name one example. But on the other hand, life has gifted me the valuable lesson of observing and accepting cycles.

Over time, I’ve also learned that you can lose something and find it again later—under a different shape, with a different name. In life, as in art, nostalgia has helped me retrieve what was lost and transform the past by weaving it together with new discoveries. In that process, contradiction is no longer a struggle, but a harmony.