Reclaiming Your Mind One Mess at a Time - Day 1
Ever feel like you're being buried alive in junk? I get that feeling often because I live with four kids and a pack rat, but sometimes taking control of my environment helps me take control of my mind.
Most people traditionally roll up their sleeves and clear out their excess junk once a year when Winter wanes and Spring blooms. I do it whenever I feel like that critter in Labyrinth - the one that lived in the junkyard and carried all her possessions around on her back. Remember her? Watching her walk around on screen was a revelation for me at the time. I have never forgotten her character as a metaphor for my life, usually with projects draped all over me. Whenever I feel bogged down, my life is usually buried with clutter so I get busy removing that clutter. This time, however, I'm busy with homeschool and writing and everything else under the sun I want to accomplish before I turn 41 this December. That's why I decided to attack just one mess at a time per day for a week.
I started with the car mess that was living in the corner of our livingroom by the guitars and beautiful doll hutch - a perfect place for car junk, don't you think? When my Plymouth Voyager gave up the ghost last August we had to replace it in a hurry so we swept everything out and into a box and crammed it all into a temporary corner. Unbelievably, that "temporary" mess was still around a full two months after we purchased the Dodge Caravan. In fact, that mess had started to forward its mail to its new location. How embarrassing. I've turned the postman away twice already.
So I hauled it out, separated it into three piles. Keepers, Maybes, and a very large "Why the heck do I still have this?" pile. I kept in my mind one simple adage:
I'm busy; you're busy. Who has time for sorting and filing? Anything broken that you haven't fixed yet but hoped you would when you had more free time is just a lie sitting in a pile with other lies collecting dust. Just get rid of it! And so I did. I bought a $6 storage box at Wal*Mart and placed the Keepers in there, threw out all of the "Why the heck" pile, and even tossed many of the Maybes. I spent about 30 minutes tops. Getting it done quickly was part of my goal, so I raced like a whirlwind through the pile before I had a chance to get distracted.
Of course, I work with my own messes. I don't chuck out my wife's or kids' belongings, though many times I have dreamily stood there in front of the towers of junk and imagined how good that would feel. We can't impose our need for order on others if it involves tossing their belongings. Not without their permission. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have enough boxes of junk of my own to keep me busy for a week.
In my mind I thought out how I'd photoblog the whole experience for you to be inspired, but I forgot to take pictures until I was finished. How wonderfully AD/HD of me. At any rate, you can see that the pile is now all neat and organized and my brain sighs in relief instead of feeling like it was just poked with a stick when I look at it. The corner is much less cluttered, or at least it doesn't represent a Checker Auto counter anymore. Today I'll tackle that old camera box in the closet. I bet I can junk the lot of it.
Join me each day and comment here when you finish. Spread the word. Let's get a whole bunch of us filling up landfills across the world*. The trick is to pick a small pile. Don't decide to clean out the garage or attic today. We want to build self-esteem through success, not tear it down through failure. Most of my readers are dealing with Depression, AD/HD, or both so beginning yet another unfinished project brings a lot of emotional baggage. I can handle largish piles of junk, but maybe you get all wobbly in the knees just thinking of yesterday's mail. Start small and congratulate yourself on success. Know your limits, but push to expand them, and always remember to work fast and when in doubt, throw it out.
Day One (Corner of Car Junk)
Day Two (Camera Box)
Day Three (Photo Box from Hell)
Day Four (The Easy Peasy Refrigerator Top)
Day Five (Kitchen Storage Shelves)
Day Six (Studio)
Day Seven (PC Junk Box)
Edited 22 October 2007, Monday, 9:19PM: The teaser pronouns were bugging me.
*Always recycle. Landfills are for cup snakes that save the planet.
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Most people traditionally roll up their sleeves and clear out their excess junk once a year when Winter wanes and Spring blooms. I do it whenever I feel like that critter in Labyrinth - the one that lived in the junkyard and carried all her possessions around on her back. Remember her? Watching her walk around on screen was a revelation for me at the time. I have never forgotten her character as a metaphor for my life, usually with projects draped all over me. Whenever I feel bogged down, my life is usually buried with clutter so I get busy removing that clutter. This time, however, I'm busy with homeschool and writing and everything else under the sun I want to accomplish before I turn 41 this December. That's why I decided to attack just one mess at a time per day for a week. I started with the car mess that was living in the corner of our livingroom by the guitars and beautiful doll hutch - a perfect place for car junk, don't you think? When my Plymouth Voyager gave up the ghost last August we had to replace it in a hurry so we swept everything out and into a box and crammed it all into a temporary corner. Unbelievably, that "temporary" mess was still around a full two months after we purchased the Dodge Caravan. In fact, that mess had started to forward its mail to its new location. How embarrassing. I've turned the postman away twice already.
So I hauled it out, separated it into three piles. Keepers, Maybes, and a very large "Why the heck do I still have this?" pile. I kept in my mind one simple adage:
When in doubt, throw it out
I'm busy; you're busy. Who has time for sorting and filing? Anything broken that you haven't fixed yet but hoped you would when you had more free time is just a lie sitting in a pile with other lies collecting dust. Just get rid of it! And so I did. I bought a $6 storage box at Wal*Mart and placed the Keepers in there, threw out all of the "Why the heck" pile, and even tossed many of the Maybes. I spent about 30 minutes tops. Getting it done quickly was part of my goal, so I raced like a whirlwind through the pile before I had a chance to get distracted.Of course, I work with my own messes. I don't chuck out my wife's or kids' belongings, though many times I have dreamily stood there in front of the towers of junk and imagined how good that would feel. We can't impose our need for order on others if it involves tossing their belongings. Not without their permission. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have enough boxes of junk of my own to keep me busy for a week.
In my mind I thought out how I'd photoblog the whole experience for you to be inspired, but I forgot to take pictures until I was finished. How wonderfully AD/HD of me. At any rate, you can see that the pile is now all neat and organized and my brain sighs in relief instead of feeling like it was just poked with a stick when I look at it. The corner is much less cluttered, or at least it doesn't represent a Checker Auto counter anymore. Today I'll tackle that old camera box in the closet. I bet I can junk the lot of it. Join me each day and comment here when you finish. Spread the word. Let's get a whole bunch of us filling up landfills across the world*. The trick is to pick a small pile. Don't decide to clean out the garage or attic today. We want to build self-esteem through success, not tear it down through failure. Most of my readers are dealing with Depression, AD/HD, or both so beginning yet another unfinished project brings a lot of emotional baggage. I can handle largish piles of junk, but maybe you get all wobbly in the knees just thinking of yesterday's mail. Start small and congratulate yourself on success. Know your limits, but push to expand them, and always remember to work fast and when in doubt, throw it out.
Day One (Corner of Car Junk)
Day Two (Camera Box)
Day Three (Photo Box from Hell)
Day Four (The Easy Peasy Refrigerator Top)
Day Five (Kitchen Storage Shelves)
Day Six (Studio)
Day Seven (PC Junk Box)
Edited 22 October 2007, Monday, 9:19PM: The teaser pronouns were bugging me.
*Always recycle. Landfills are for cup snakes that save the planet.
Like reading The Splintered Mind? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, or subscribe!
Comments
We had such a whirlwind summer of moving our stuff into storage to prepare a house to sell (they call it de-cluttering, and it's a multi-million dollar industry!), listing and showing the house, buying a new house closer to my new job, moving to the new house, selling the old house (in that order), unloading the storage locker into the new basement, getting our furniture three weeks after actually moving, and trying to start a new teaching job in the process . . . Now, slowly but surely, as I unload boxes, I am doing the sorting, tossing and unpiling. Unfortunately, a new teaching job requires 60+ hours a week, and so a lot of the debris is being moved by my husband. Letting go of that control is tough for me!! Plus, he's the pack rat who wants to save all 350 cassette tapes that date back to pre-1990, when we stopped buying new cassettes, because he might want to listen to them someday (never mind that we haven't listened to them in over ten years, and they'd probably disintegrate in the cassette deck by now. We MUST find a way to store and access them, right?) :-)
I should take a picture of our "office" area, which is piled floor to ceiling with stuff we haven't unpacked yet, including boxes of old clothes that haven't fit anyone in fifteen years, but we keep hoping we'll lose weight!
It's kind of scary!
I tease my wife, but I'm a pack rat, too. I just call myself a collector. ahem...
I could riddle my articles with emoticons but then it'd look like it was written by a 16 year old high schooler. :)
my mom can NOT get rid of stuff - arrgh - its soo annoying
everything iis precious and valuable to her - even old newspapers
yaargh!!
that's a nice photo of u btw!