There were over 200 postcards on my wall when I tore them all down last week.
The collection began as a protest against the plain white walls of my bedroom and grew into a ritual over the course of three years; every two weeks I walked into the library, took one of each of the free postcards by the door and stuck them on the wall. I used a string line to keep the rows straight.
Years of evaporative cooling wasn't particularly kind to the postcards and over time they they began to warp and fall as the blu-tac lost it's grip on the cracking paint, but I left them there when I moved away from home because it seemed like such a big job to undo what had taken me years to achieve.
I still don't really know what made me take them all down, part of me was sick of the now crooked lines they formed, part of me wanted to finally push away a version of myself I didn't particularly like that existed during the years of postcard collection. Part of me was mad at my parents and wanted to expend some anger on inanimate objects. And so with headphones on to block out any misgivings I had, I took every single postcard down. I peeled, scraped and pulled every piece of blu-tac off the walls. When the paint came off with it I didn't have the same lurch of fear I used to, the walls were cracking, they needed to be painted anyway.
In the height of my angsty-teen years, I wrote song lyrics on the backs of the postcards before tacking them to the wall, one of the reasons I never took them down was to spare myself the pain of cringing at my fourteen year old self. But I read the back of every postcard as I stacked them in the recycling bin and I realised that under the insecure, weak and selfish person I felt I used to be, was the same curious, anxious and frustrated person I still see in myself. A person who wanted the world to change and wanted to understand why they felt how they felt.
I left home for another city the next day, no time to feel the new emptiness of my old bedroom. It was liberating to tear down my high school self, but I can't help but feel I have left my parents with a sense of loss far greater than what I feel.