I have more than a dozen college textbooks on my office shelves. I graduated over twenty years ago. I don’t read them. I don’t need them. The overwhelming majority of the content has never applied to any of my jobs.
One, Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer, caught my eye recently. I pulled it off the shelf, blew the dust off the top, and thumbed through its nearly 1,000 pages. I’ve carried that book across a few houses, through three career changes, and into a life where heat transfer is only relevant when I’m talking to a warehouse guy in Pennsylvania who’s freezing in February.
But I haven’t thrown it out.
A few years ago, I recycled some of the non-engineering books. But I couldn’t bring myself to part with Advanced Linear Algebra or Product Design and Development. Not because I‘d ever read them again, but because letting go felt like discarding a version of myself I’d worked hard to become — the one who clung to those books because they mattered once.
Because they signaled the career I thought I was building.
Textbooks are hard to get rid of anyway. Thrift stores won’t take them. Schools don’t want them. And recycling them feels… disrespectful. Like throwing away the evidence that I tried.
I went into distribution. I made more money working in a warehouse than I could’ve as a starting engineer. And I was having fun. Later, I helped start a solar company that’s done well. More recently, I’ve launched a consulting and software firm. The work is meaningful. It fits.
Still, the books remain.
I don’t keep them because I’ll ever use them. I keep them because they represent a version of me that worked hard to be smart enough, capable enough, and respected enough. I keep them because they were expensive and heavy, and at the time, they made me feel like I was on my way somewhere.
They made me feel legitimate.
Even now — long after I’ve left the world where differential equations matter — I still keep them. Letting go feels like admitting that chapter didn’t carry forward. That some of what I built was scaffolding to be torn down, not structure. That I spent years climbing something I wasn’t going to stay on.
The grief isn’t about the books. It’s about what they represent:
- Effort that didn’t lead where I thought it would.
- A dream that never quite materialized.
- A version of myself I haven’t figured out how to honor without keeping physical proof.
“I studied Mechanical Engineering, but I’ve never worked as one.” I say that all the time.
And just to be clear — I love the life my wife and I have built. I don’t regret skipping the engineering career path. I learned valuable problem-solving skills that I still use all the time. But those books aren’t about knowledge.
They’re about identity.
And they’re not alone.
It’s the stuffed lion I had as a kid — the one I swore I’d never lose, but eventually lost in a move.
It’s the cabinet full of charging cables for devices I haven’t owned in a decade.
It’s the drawer, the box, the shelf, the… whatever.
The identity stockpile.
The stuff we hold onto because it reminds us of who we were — or who we wanted to be.
And maybe, sometimes, who we’re still afraid to stop being.
When I look at those books, I don’t feel smarter. Sometimes, I feel stuck. Like I’ve been trying to keep every version of myself alive at the same time. And it’s exhausting.
There’s a particular weight in trying to prove that nothing was wasted.
But that’s the lie.
Some things are just stepping stones — not lifelong companions. Maybe the lesson is the only thing that’s meant to follow you. Maybe usefulness isn’t the metric. I keep a completely valueless miniature leprechaun figurine on my desk for good luck. No one asks it to justify its place.
The moment something no longer serves your life, it doesn’t need to be carried just to prove you once needed it. But I still wrestle with the fear that setting it down means letting go of what once made me matter.
So, I keep the books.
Because discarding them feels like discarding the effort.
Because I don’t yet know what it means to carry the lesson, but not the weight.
That’s been the theme of my writing for the last few months, I think.
Learning what to carry.
And what to let go.
I don’t have a clean resolution yet.
I don’t know if I’ll recycle those books out next week or a decade from now. But when I walk into my office and see them, I feel a quiet tension. A gentle invitation. A voice that says:
“You can let this go now.”
And just as quickly, the reply:
“Maybe tomorrow.”
This isn’t an essay about finally throwing the books away.
It’s about realizing I’ve kept them for reasons I never named.
It’s about the highly emotional process of letting go — not just of objects, but of identities I no longer need to wear.
I used to think growth would feel more triumphant. That there’d be a signal. A line crossed. But most of what I’ve learned feels closer to subtraction, even sadness, than addition. Like losing my grip. Like shedding skin. Like standing in front of a bookshelf, wondering who I’m trying to convince.
There’s no climax to this story. Just a slow becoming.
And that is enough.
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