Clear out

Something very odd has happened. In the last few months, while a lot of our stuff has been stashed away in a friend's barn, and while we were away travelling and using very little as we went, my attitude to all my 'belongings' has changed. I've come home, looked at all this stuff with a beady eye and decided I don't want it.
Things I have cherished and kept and hung on to and stored and lost and found and lost again - well, now, with a clear conscience, I find I can just throw them out.
Hallelujah!
My mother's stuff, my grandmother's stuff, my old school stuff, my kids' stuff, books, papers, clothes, furniture, paintings, antiques, ceramics, art, boots, gadgets, crocks, garden things - all of it - out it goes.
I put masses of this stuff out on the pavement in front of my house, with signs saying 'Help yourself', and within a few hours, it all disappeared. I didn't even have to take it to the charity shops. I could put up a notice to say 'Please make a donation to the charity of your choice' I suppose, but it seems to me that in giving all this stuff away, I am engaging in a primal act of charity - free donation.
Almost nothing has caused me a pang. One silly item I slightly regret losing, bought a few years ago at a French village 'vide grenier' for about five pence - a strange ceramic cowl to sit in a chimney to keep out the rain, with heart shapes cut out of its ironstone sides.
Otherwise I have given away blankets, curtains, antique chairs, shoes, plate racks, saucepans, tables, a TV, books, bike bits, fabric, dust sheets, piles of nice old plates, a telephone, a clothes airer, a jam saucepan, baskets, an iron, a shower unit, baby clothes, loads of stuff.....
To me, there are two great blessings which have come from this. I have a lot more SPACE and I am totally exhilarated by the new sense of freedom I have found from giving it all away.
In fact I have spent all my life using THINGS to help me work out who I am. If I had 'this' I would clearly be seen as 'this' kind of person. If I had 'that' I could be 'that' kind of person.
Now - due to a lot of work in therapy groups (Promis) and in Al-Anon, and on my own, I can be myself without reference to these external items. I no longer have the urge to buy every desirable object I see in shops, and I no longer need to hold on to these things just because I happen to have them, or they happened to be my mother's, or whatever.
I realise that before I could ever have physically disposed of all this stuff, I had to do it in my head. The result is painless.
There is too much stuff in the Western world. I am relinquishing my grasp on a houseful of it.