Hi friends.
I’m going to start this off by informing you that I am not a messy person, no
matter what this post leads you to believe. Got it? Me, Hannah – not a messy
person. Now we can move on.
As
I said in my last post, I live with my mom and sisters in the same house that I
grew up in. I’m still in the same bedroom I’ve been in since I was about eight
or nine years old. It’s been through multiple arrangements and three different
wall colors. The furniture has stayed the same, with two exceptions: a
bookshelf and a wall shelf, both added within the last six years. There’s
absolutely nothing wrong with my room (other than it being a tad on the small
side); but I’ll admit to feeling sometimes as if there’s nothing really right
with it either. (I’m being a tad dramatic here, but doesn’t it make everything
feel more interesting?)
But
here’s the thing: as much as I do love my bedroom, it is definitely very small.
And as happens when you live in the same place for your whole life, I have
accumulated a lot of stuff. And the thing with having a small area to do with
as you please is that there isn’t a whole lot of room for this plethora of stuff. And so it starts to feel cramped.
And cluttered. And dare I say it, messy.
Now, some people may be able to live with a messy room. I know people who get
mad when their room is clean because then they have no idea where anything is.
Organized chaos, they call it. That’s all well and good – I can do a bit of
organized chaos. It can be exhilarating, honestly. But I can’t live in it. For
me, when I live in a space that’s cluttered, that isn’t organized and doesn’t
seem clean, that’s how my brain feels. And if you’ll remember from my last
post, I have some goals I’m trying to achieve this year. Goals are hard to
achieve when you feel like you don’t have your shit together, and a
disorganized room makes me feel like I don’t have my shit together.
Since
I’m trying to be all introspective and junk this year, here are the issues I
have with my room:
·
There’s too much stuff. This is the overarching
issue – too much stuff, too little space. The reason there’s too much stuff is
because I am a packrat. I keep EVERYTHING. Case in point – behind my dresser,
there are probably about twenty-five paper bags that I have thrown back there
instead of throwing them out or recycling them, because WHAT IF I NEED
THEM?!?!? (Spoiler alert: I’ve never needed them.)
·
Since there’s too much stuff, there’s stuff
everywhere. On the floor, mostly, because any free space on top of shelves or
tables has been claimed long ago. One of my more genius moments was when I
realized that gravity made it so that I could hang clothes on hangers without
having a closet by balancing the tips of the hangers on one of the two shelves
in my room. #physicswinning
·
I definitely have a habit of just dropping
things on the floor. Since there’s not a lot of room, it feels like nothing has
a set place to go. So I get a bit lazy and just sort of put things wherever
they fall. Definitely not the best
habit I could have formed. This issue is really all on me.
·
All of these issues snowball and combine into me
feeling like crap. Like I said, I’m not a messy person, inherently. And no one
likes feeling like they’re living in squalor. (Again, a tad overdramatic. But
hyperbole is one of my favorite writing tools, so you’re just gonna have to
learn to love it if you don’t already.)
 |
| The "before" panoramic shot. |
So how do I fix
this? There are a few options. One – I could burn the house down. Bit extreme,
really. Plus, it would lead to a whole host of other problems that I really
just don’t have time for. (In case it isn’t obvious, this is a joke.) Two – I
could just embrace the mess and try my very hardest not to let it bother me.
This is not a good option, because if you know me at all, you know this to be
pretty true: I cannot let anything go. There’s stuff that happened years ago,
that other people have DEFINITELY forgotten, that I still freak out about. Elsa
and I are pretty much exact opposites. (Though to be honest, I don’t think
she’s as over everything as she says she is. But that’s a whole different post
about the virtues and vices of Frozen, so we’ll move on.) Three – I could keep
doing what I have been doing, which is trying to keep the piles on the floor
contained to only a couple of main areas, cleaning up when I feel like I can’t
even sleep in my room because the mess is too much, and doing a BIG clean-out
two or three times a year, where I usually end up throwing out about half to a
full bag of stuff I just don’t need anymore.
That third option
has been my go-to for a while now, and on the surface, it works. It’s minimal
effort with the most bang for my buck. But it doesn’t truly fix anything. It’s
like putting a Band-Aid on a cut that needs a couple stitches – sure, it helps
keep the blood from getting everywhere, but it doesn’t actually help your body
heal. For whatever reason, I’m tired of getting out the box of Band-Aids. So I
decided to make a bigger change.
So today (today
being Saturday, January 14, 2017), I undertook the task of an overhaul. I spent
four hours going through everything in my room, doing a bastardization of Marie
Kondo’s de-cluttering tips from The
Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, where I pretty much just looked at
everything, asked myself if there was really a reason for it to be in my life,
and if that reason made me happy, and if the answer to either of those
questions was no, I tossed it. (To be fair and completely honest, there were a
few things I did not do this with. I found a lot of old photographs. There’s
really no reason to keep them, other than they’re fun to look at occasionally,
and there was room in my under-the-bed container for them, so I kept them. Same
with a few other pieces of nostalgia from high school, and a journal I found
that I kept during one of the hardest years of my life. This is why I say I did
a bastardization.) (I also say I did a bastardization because I haven’t
actually read the book yet. #oops.) I had to continually remind myself that not
everything is as important as I think it is, and that it’s okay to throw things
out, even if maybe one day in the future you end up needing the thing you throw
out.
I got rid of a
lot of stuff. Four trash bags worth of junk went into the garbage, and one
trash bag full of clothes I don’t wear or even look at anymore went into the
corner of the living room so that I can bring it to the Red Cross donation bins
ASAP. I feel like I need to throw out more stuff, honestly. I had told a friend
of mine yesterday that this was what my plans for the day were, and when I
texted her to let her know I had achieved it, I told her that it didn’t feel
“done.” But I think that I was just getting trash-happy. Throwing out more stuff
just for the sake of throwing stuff out wouldn’t have ended well, I can say
that with the upmost certainty. I also am quite annoyed with my cleaning job,
just because it had the unfortunate side effect of me needing to go buy a new
computer charger. (While I was vacuuming, some cords got tangled and ended up
knocking my laptop off my bedside table. Originally I thought the fall had
broken my entire computer, but it just broke the charger. All in all, a better
outcome than it could have been, but it’s still almost $100 I would rather have
not spent today. Damn you, Apple and your inconceivable prices!) But all in
all… I feel accomplished. There’s a whole lot of clutter that was in my life
this morning when I woke up that isn’t in my life anymore now. That’s never a
bad outcome, really.
 |
| Here's the "after!" The picture makes it hard to tell, but it really is so much better than before. |
 |
| This corner was one of my biggest problems before. Now... things have their own spots! Yay! |
The trick now
will be to keep it this way. I’ve found some places for things that didn’t have
places before, and I’m going to try and make a conscious effort to put them
there after I’m done using them. It will feel like a lot of effort until it
becomes a habit, because that’s the way life works – habits can’t become habits
overnight, no matter how much you wish they would. We’ll see how it goes.
I think that’s it
for now. My stomach is growling, plus I need to go put the vacuum away. Alright
friends. We’ll talk soon. (You’ve actually managed to get a second blog post
within the SAME MONTH, so who knows? This thing might actually stick.) (Knock
on wood.) Love you, mean it, bye.
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