Throwing stuff out

I am trying to clean my house. You know, the actual elbow grease kind of cleaning where you have to take everything off of shelves to dust and move furniture to clean properly. As I move things around, I realize that I have way too much crap. I think I am super sentimental and hold on to things because the person who gave it to me means so much to me. But that person is not going to mean any less to me just because I don't keep the trinket forever, right? Something snapped and I have been tossing stuff left and right. Ideally I would have all empty shelves. I don't... and probably never will. (Can't kill the packrat entirely.) But I do have at least three new empty shelves and I have only just begun. My trash people are going to hate me. And now I have to decide whether to burden my church with the stuff that I want to donate or Goodwill.
You know, the people that intrigue me the most are the ones that could toss their belongings into a backpack and go off into the world. I would love to be able to do that, only they don't make a backpack big enough.
I will give myself credit, though. I went through all my old notebooks and tore out all my poems, and stories that I wanted to keep and got rid of the rest. So forgive me if you find a sappy poem from my younger days on this page in the coming days.
I am trying to let go, but some things are just a part of me and so I guess I will never have an empty bookshelf. But rereading that makes me realize that that is not necessarily a bad thing.