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"This Is Me": How Silent Objects Hold Your Symbolic DNA (And Why You Can’t Throw Them Away)
- Efrat Shani
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
They aren’t just things taking up space in your drawer - they are a physical extension of your soul. Here is why the items you refuse to discard carry the exact blueprint of your past and the key to your future.
I am sitting on my studio floor right now, surrounded by cardboard boxes.
There are books in uneven piles. Scarves I forgot I owned. Old notebooks with pages that smell faintly of another decade. A small ceramic bowl with a crack across its lip. Photographs in envelopes, slipping out of their paper skins.
I am packing up my life to move across the world, and the strange thing about moving is this: nothing stays abstract. Every object must be touched. Every object asks for a verdict.
Do I take you with me? Do I give you away? Do I leave you behind?
It sounds like logistics, but it becomes a quiet psychological ceremony. I pick up a thing, and suddenly I am no longer choosing an item. I am choosing which version of myself still gets to travel.
Packing is tactile and makes memory visible.
In my academic research at Bezalel Academy of Art & Design, which I call Chafetzat Chaim (Objects of Life), I study the things we keep. Not the obvious or expensive things. The small, worn-out, nearly invisible things.
A faded photograph. A broken necklace. A recipe in someone’s handwriting. A perfume bottle with nothing left inside except the idea of a person.
I call them silent objects because they do not announce their importance. They do not defend themselves. And still, they take up space in drawers, suitcases, and our inner world.
An old photograph is a perfect example. We tend to think of a photograph as an image, a window into the past. But a photograph is also a physical object. It has corners, weight, texture, damage, and a crease from being held too often. It is a body for memory. And when memory has a body, we can hold it.
"This is me."
One of the most moving discoveries in my research happened again and again across different homes and stories. When women picked up these objects, they rarely said, “This is an old thing.” They stated, in one way or another: “This is me.”
That sentence has stayed with me. Because it reveals that these objects are not property standing outside of us - they are a physical extension of who we are, and a direct reflection of our inner landscape.
We do not merely hold them; we feel with them, feel through them, and see ourselves reflected in their materiality. The object does not just serve us; it embodies us.
We do not only keep objects because we are sentimental;
we keep them because they preserve a self that once existed, or a self that was never fully seen. A silent object can hold the proof of a season we survived. It can hold the wound of not being loved enough. It can hold a version of us that was young, abandoned, brave, grieving, or becoming.
This is why throwing something away can feel violent - it feels like discarding a piece of our own body and identity. The mind may say, “It is just a thing.” The nervous system answers, “No, this is a witness.”
Things We Think With
MIT Professor Sherry Turkle has written beautifully about "Evocative Objects"—objects we think with. She shares the story of a woman who kept her late mother’s simple blue glass juicer.
On the surface, it was a practical kitchen object. But after her mother’s death, its color, weight, and texture turned into a sensory container. It held mornings in the kitchen. Citrus oil in the air. Care made visible through repetition. Loss made touchable.
The juicer no longer existed only to squeeze fruit. It held maternal care and absence. This is what silent objects do. They migrate from function into meaning.
The Hidden Logic of What We Keep
There is a private logic to what we keep. A cupboard can become a museum of unfinished grief. A drawer can become an archive of all the selves we had to abandon in order to keep going.
This does not mean we must keep everything. It means we must learn to listen before we release. Clutter often numbs us, but an archive asks to be read.
When we keep an object without knowing why, it may quietly keep us inside an old pattern. We may carry loyalty to pain or protect an identity that was built entirely around survival. But when we learn to read the object, something opens.
We can finally ask:
What memory lives here?
What pattern does it repeat?
What strength has been hiding inside it?
Sometimes the answer is, “I am ready to release this.” Sometimes it is, “I am ready to keep this differently.” Both are forms of freedom.
An Invitation: EveryTHING We Keep
If there is an object in your home that you do not throw away, but also do not talk about - pause with it. Maybe it is not a burden. Maybe it has been waiting quietly to return a piece of you to yourself.
This is the exact work we will be doing at my upcoming 3-day visual masterclass in Costa Rica, beginning on September 25th.
EveryTHING We Keep is NOT a casual workshop for organizing your closet. It is an intentional, deeply emotional space designed for people who are ready to read their own emotional archive with compassion and precision.
Together, we will explore why certain memories feel stored in objects more than in words, and how a broken thing may still carry a whole inner chapter.
We will learn to read the silent objects we carry, understand the emotional patterns they reveal, and turn our visual scars into power.
Our circle is open for ONLY 24 spots. Come sit with US.
September 25-27, 2026
10:00 - 18:00 daily
San José, Costa Rica
P.S. For those whose hearts are asking for a longer and deeper immersion, my 5-day premium retreat in Mexico this November is quietly filling up. Send Talia a private message, and let's explore if it's the right journey for you. Click below to learn more:
Much love, Efrat
