This week, our Friday Fellow, Michelle La Perrière, shares her recent process in her own words. In this day and age of the KonMari Method , it seems that I would be embarrassed about the boxes of old school papers I had shipped from my childhood home in Denver to where I live now, Baltimore after my mom died in 2010. They’ve been stored in the attic since then, and a couple weeks before my residency, in my efforts to declutter and get rid of things that “don’t spark joy,” I opened them up. I knew there would be some old Seventeen Magazines , English papers from Mr. Keinon’s 11 th grade English class… “love” letters from friends, written in Mrs. Johnson’s 9th-grade typing class, but I didn’t remember the math papers. What the… You see, I flunked geometry in 9 th grade and had to take it in high school. But really, going back further, I first became math anxious in Mrs. Kotnik’s fourth-grade class when we had to do timed multiplication and division quizzes every week. I f...