Nonsequitur Life

We’ve been in our house for four and a half years now.

It has been a royal disaster for four and a half of those four and half years.

I am not a housekeeper.

Mess and filth drive me insane, but taking care of it is like utter torture.

I am easily overwhelmed to the point of paralysis and little things turn into big things that turn into insurmountable things and…

Mental illness for the mother-fucking-win.

I’m not proud of the state of my living space. And every time someone who is not Bob or me walks into this house, I want to crawl into a hole and shrivel up from humiliation.

When I moved in with Bob (two months after we met) I left most of my STUFF at my parents house because we lived with six other people in a tiny house and only had our small (hotter than Hades) bedroom to keep our stuff. When we moved into the next place with fewer roommates and more space (a bigger bedroom and our own bathroom), I brought more stuff from my old bedroom, but we were still busting at the seams by the time we moved on from there.

After we moved into our house, my mom packed up most of my stuff into her SUV and delivered it to my doorstep. Most of it was piled into the corner of (or the entire length of) the dining area and it has sat largely untouched for four and a half years. Plastic bins full of god-knows-what lined the wall, collecting dust, shaming me every time I set foot on the main floor of my house. I sat down to go through it all once (developing a full-blown migraine in the middle of it) and purged a large trash bag of crap, but when I “finished” at the end of the day, there was still an unfathomable amount of stuff to deal with. So it was once again piled along the wall, and left to fester.

And then there’s the second bedroom upstairs.

The second bedroom is small (twin bed looks ginormous, small) and has been functioning as a glorified walk-in closet since we moved in. Everything that doesn’t have a specific place elsewhere gets shoved into that room and largely forgotten about until eventually we need it, and then have to spend forever searching for it amid the rest of the crap. There is no rhyme or reason to the way things are put in there and there is barely a path to get into the room. It’s really pretty awful.

I’ve been staring at all of it for four and a half years and the level of crazy it’s driving me has been increasing exponentially as of late. I’ve been trying to make progress on it, but it’s very slow going. I can assign sentimental value to just about anything, so I’ve been trying to judge harshly and eliminate as much as possible. (Trash, donate, whatever, just get it out the door.) But I can only sort through so much stuff before it starts to get overwhelming again and my brain starts to shut down. Since so much of it is in plastic storage bins, I’ve resorted to picking through one bin at a time, only opening another if I feel like I can handle it. It’s inefficient at best, but it’s either sloth-pace or nothing for me right now.

Bob made an observation recently…when I start productively dealing with any one of the many things that needs to get done, I start obsessing over EVERYTHING that needs to be done, and end up overwhelming and paralyzing myself all over again.

It takes me so long to muster up the mental fortitude to do something I feel like I need to do everything while I have that tiny shred of motivation.

I am so gloriously great at sabotaging myself.

I have purged a few trash bags of crap recently. Having new furniture scheduled for delivery (granted they don’t fuck it up again) has given me a deadline to face and I’ve been tackling the wall-o-mystery-crap downstairs. There’s still a lot of STUFF sitting there, but there is room for round one of new furniture. Depending on when round two gets here, will greatly influence how much more progress I make in between.

When I look at the mess around me, it’s difficult to see that, despite the mess that still exists, I have actually made progress. It’s difficult to focus on what I have done when there’s still so much I haven’t. Things are not where I want them to be, so things are not good.

Or not good enough.

I’m working on it.

But it isn’t easy.

Things that I HAVE accomplished…no matter how small…

… I emptied the bathroom cabinets and purged a fuckton of shamefully old hair products and other shit I had no idea was even in there. (We’re talking pre-Bob old. Which means it’s at least eight years old and has been packed up and moved three times. I’m pretty sure I’m a hoarder.)

… I reorganized multiple drawers and cabinets in the kitchen because trying to put things away after doing the dishes is always an adventure of where the hell does this go and how can I Tetris this into place?

… I reorganized the shelves in the laundry room, because there has never been a whole lot of rhyme or reason to any of it. Now the foil, ziplock bags, plastic wrap, et al are above the laundry detergent instead of under it, and the vacuum bags and loose attachments now have a basket to contain them instead of balancing precariously on the top shelf.

… I condensed all of our DVDs, CDs, and video games into a much smaller space, eliminating a fuckton of plastic cases, and making me realize how much awesomely bad pop music I own (in addition to multiple copies of multiple albums I have no memory of ever buying).

…We assembled the shelving unit we bought…a very long time ago…that has been sitting in the garage in the original packaging, and put it down in the basement. Then we moved a few storage bins that I have deemed “store-able” down to said shelves.

…We put together a hook board and mounted it on the wall in the laundry room, and now all my cleaning implements (broom, duster, mop, so on) have actual organization off the floor instead of just being piled haphazardly in the corner.

…I sorted through roughly 60 spiral notebooks dating back to junior high, full of old stories I barely remember writing, and even found some actual high school homework notes. It was incredibly painful, but I purged almost all of it (salvaging the unused notebook paper). I really hate to get rid of so much writing, but it’s nothing good or usable. I did keep the handful of finished stories, but the rest went into the trash heap. Rip off the band-aid or it’s never gonna get done.

…I rounded up all of our loose tools and finally put them into the toolbox we bought…a long time ago. We don’t have a huge collection by any means—we buy them as we find we need them—but they’ve been scattered around various parts of the house and now they’re all in one place. Or at least they should be. There could be some still lurking around in corners.

…I eliminated the laundry hamper (and by eliminated I mean, took it out of our closet and stashed it in the second bedroom—I KNOW) and replaced it with multiple laundry baskets. Laundry gets sorted as it gets dirtied and because I have a visual reference to how much is there, I am much better at keeping up with getting things washed in a timely fashion instead of letting it pile up until we have no clean socks and underwear. It still sometimes sits longer than it should, but as long as we do have clean undergarments, I don’t consider myself too far behind.

And when I need a break from productivity, I can always cut out some duck stickers for my forehead.

What?

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Give Me the World Marc Roberge