There is a large four-poster bed on the pavement outside my house. I know this because I put it there, along with a sign saying, “for donation”.

There’s a long history to this bed, starting with when I bought it overseas many a year ago with my then-partner as we started a new and exciting life together. It was such a big and grown-up purchase at the time; only years before I had been sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a squat.

Is that couch you brought into the relationship really worth arguing over? There are lots of couches. Credit: ISTOCK

When my partner and I split some decades later, I just couldn’t part with our bed. To me, losing it would be too hard, along with the pain of losing him. It had too many memories connected to it. I felt it was part of me. And so I just kept it, without discussion or grace. This, I regret.

Yet today, as I was packing for a move to a new apartment, a fresh phase in my life, I couldn’t give a flying about that bed, its sentimentality or its monetary value. I want someone else to enjoy it, to make new memories on it. For me, it is just stuff. An item I no longer need.

In fact, accompanying that bed on the pavement are other things I once enjoyed but no longer desire: the desk I wrote my novel at; a cabinet I kept my cherished curios in; and a chair my much-missed friend gave me when she moved back to America some 20-odd years ago. All once sentimental and valued. All now not.

For this move, I have looked afresh at all my things and asked if they really are still my pride and joy, or are they just more stuff moving from one neglected space to another? Do I really need them just because I once liked them? And the clanger: do I like them enough to make them part of my future?

My life lessons, my pain and my joys are going nowhere. They are who I am and how I got here. My material possessions, I have realised, are not.

The answer for me this time has been consistently to let it go, each liberated item leaving no feared emotional dent whatsoever. The ability to see space without it being weighed down with stuff and saying farewell to the artefacts of another time is sheer delight. Like shedding an old skin.

The freeing trigger for me as I packed was that memories and memorabilia are not the same. My life lessons, my pain and my joys are going nowhere. They are who I am and how I got here. My material possessions, I have realised, are not. And do not think I take for granted that I have material goods in the first place. I know I’ve had the good fortune of creature comforts.