My Life Essay Compared to John Freyer’s Essay, All my Life for Sale

Growing up and having been taught to be reserved and humble, I am not the type of individual to publicly post my life events on the web, where anyone can have access to my private life. Private life should remain private, not for the entire universe to peep into intimate parts of your life. Selling personal items to complete strangers who do not share the same values as me just seems bizarre to me. In John Freyer’s essay, “All My Life For Sale”, Freyer goes on a selling expedition of his cherished belongings, which all hold some sort of connection to himself, Freyer came to the realization that he no longer yearned for the liberation of living in New York, but to be anchored down and stay rooted to a place he has built a connection to. I agree with Freyer that everyone needs a place to be rooted to, and the best way to stay rooted is to keep items of sentimental value.

If I were to select a few items to auction off on the Internet, I would have the hardest time selling my pink teddy bear and my family photos. Each and every one of the items mentioned above holds a very personal and deep history to me, which I would never want to forget or lose. When I was eleven years old and my family went to Las Vegas for the first time; I remember the vacation not being a very happy one. It was around the time my Grandmother had passed away and my family was stricken with grief. My Uncle Tom thought a family vacation would help direct our sorrows elsewhere and make us happier. When we went to Circus Circus in Las Vegas, I was not in any mood to be happy and playing games. However, upon many encouragements for me to enjoy myself, I sloppily tossed a quarter on the table in front of me, and surprisingly I had miraculously managed to to...

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...f mines. My possessions are tied to memories and experiences I have gone through, and without them, I would not be how I am today.

In John Freyer’s essay, “All my Life for Sale” he is telling his audience that it is ultimately alright for people to have personal belongings that “own them”. Everyone has something that they deem as personal and would like to keep to themselves in privacy. If one has nothing to anchor them to their past, most likely they forget. Having a physical object as a reminder holds a much stronger value than just memories you remember. Freyer’s items represented his memories and roots to where he lived in Iowa. Once it was all sold, he had nothing left but nostalgia for the missing items. As John Freyer said, “I wanted to return…and continue the life I’d started there…I wanted a place to be grounded. I wanted to stop starting over” (87).