Before you live the dream, you must live the nightmare. I’m writing from my parents’ house in central PA, which means that I have sold all my belongings, moved out of my house, bid farewell to Philly, settled my cats in their new homes, and said goodbye to my friends. I’m spending the week hanging out at my mom’s house, getting things in order and visiting with family before the real journey begins. I’ll be writing a couple of posts to chronicle the transitionary period of the last few weeks.

If you’re even marginally settled and established in life, dismantling your nest is a tough thing to do. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from doing something like this no matter what your age is — but it IS harder to do the older you get.

We’ll only be able to bring the contents of our suitcases with us to Spain, and airline weight limits are no joke, so that means basically just our clothes. The majority of apartments there are furnished anyway, so we really don’t need anything. And since we’ll want to buy clothes when we’re there too, we’re trying to limit ourselves even with the wardrobes we pack.

Though Haider and I didn’t own much of anything when we moved in together in 2012, we acquired a lot of things very quickly. We rapidly filled our first home with crappy hand me downs and furniture from the free section of Craigslist. We gradually picked up some nicer things, but we really had no connection to the majority of our possessions. So we got rid of ‘em all!

We threw a “party” in which we plied our friends with promises of beer and free stuff. They came over throughout the day and took our things — our books, our clothes, our knickknacks, our furniture. It was an odd, morbid feeling in a way — like watching vultures picking at your own carcass. But it was cool, too. It’s nice to know that all of our friends have little bits and pieces of us in their homes now. In the week after the big purge, every time I saw one of my girlfriends, they’d be wearing at least one article of my clothing.

We also donated a ton of stuff to the thrift store, which we can write off on our taxes. The artwork we’d framed (a stage of adulthood we’d only reached about 6 months before our departure), nice kitchen gadgets we’d acquired, and a few sentimental items of furniture were stored in our parents’ homes. Everything else is gone.

The past week has been quite freeing, and I haven’t felt as sentimental as I would have expected. We spent a super comfortable week crashing at my best friend’s gorgeous house with her very welcoming boyfriend, roommates and big fluffy husky Miles. Each day I woke up and got ready for work expecting to feel weird or sad that I wasn’t in my own house, but I really just felt unburdened and relaxed. Having no possessions and no home is kind of great.

Of course, this is speaking after it’s already done. I had to delete a super dramatic draft of a post I wrote my first night of packing, when I started tackling the boxes and boxes of “special things” that I’ve been lugging around for over a decade. Boxes of ticket stubs, notes, brochures, receipts, weird little things with no value at all except the memories they were tied to. Boxes I moved with me from house to house but hadn’t even opened in years. If they would have just disappeared without my knowledge, I’d never have remembered that they even existed. Yet it was so, so hard to throw them away — like a weird betrayal of all the special times they represented.

But it’s done. And I’m glad. The next nightmare was saying goodbye to our loved ones, and that was a thousand times harder. I’ll save that for the next post.

T-Minus 4 days to departure and right at this moment, I couldn’t be more excited.