Accepting Myself Decluttered My House

Confession: I’ve been a clutter person my whole life.
Confession: I’ve bought lots and lots of de-cluttering and organizing books.
Result until recently: I’m still a clutter person.

I’m that person who has a messy house, but not a dirty house.  I lose things in my own home.  I end up with a few of each of those things you really only need one of because I can’t find the one I have.  I’m the Queen of CHAOS (Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome – FlyLady).

My parents were neat freaks.  Everything had a place.  When I vacuumed the carpet in our house, it took forever, because as you worked across the carpet, you went forward in a straight line, moved to left one-half vacuum width and came backward, then you moved right one full vacuum width going forward, then back to the left one-half width to come back.  If you did it right, you got rid of every vacuum wheel line except the one at the end.  We didn’t walk in the living room because then there would be footprints on the carpet.  In the family room, there were always three magazines on the end table, overlapping in a line with only the titles shown.  When I was young, I thought it was because of my mom.  After she died, my dad stopped having magazines and books because they were clutter.  He got rid of the furniture in the finished part of the basement because it was clutter.  My guess is that he was the neat freak.

Some people follow this childhood by becoming another generation of neat freaks.  Not me.  I went the other direction.  The kitchen counter became my gathering place for every piece of paperwork in the house.  I probably have about 3,000 books in the house.  I have three old computers that I don’t ever use, and one that I occasionally use, in addition to my current computer and laptop.  After all, I might want to play one of those old computer games on Windows 95, right?

I look at de-cluttering books, and think that maybe, just maybe, they will help me to organize this whole mess.  Each time I buy one, I am temporarily energized, and I clean up and organize for a few weeks.  Each time, I fail.  Each time, that’s one more book added to the clutter.

During the last two years, I’ve actually been changing, though.  I think that the reason is that I actually like myself.  Life circumstances made me decide that I was valuable enough that I deserved to live in a peaceful, attractive space.

Earlier in life, I always knew I didn’t measure up.  I wasn’t social enough, athletic enough, smart enough, accomplished enough… just not enough.  Plus, I was boring.  My dad would talk on and on about golf and tennis, and watching golf and tennis on tv, and I didn’t play golf at all, and was only okay at tennis and didn’t watch it on tv.  I had to stop skiing because of bad knees, and so I couldn’t make great conversation about skiing vacations.  One day, it hit me – my own dad may have found me boring, but, in reality, he was just as boring to me.  He couldn’t talk about politics or societal issues, and didn’t do any of the entertainment things that I did.  He watched sports on tv; I watched sci-fi movies and shows.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I do love my dad, and I like him a lot, too.  But coming to the realization that I could roll my eyes at his entertainment just as much as he could at me meant that we were finally on more equal footing and I didn’t feel like the boring part was all on me.    I also went through some relationship issues at that time, and realized that the man who makes you cry isn’t one who is worth crying about.  I had value.

When I realized that I had value, I also realized that I deserved a nice home.  A “nice home” doesn’t have to mean a big house with all the bells and whistles and a maid.  A “nice home” means somewhere that I can feel good about waking up in in the morning, happy to have someone drop by, and peaceful in when I go to sleep at night.

In the middle of a few decades of trying to de-clutter, the only method that sporadically worked for me was FlyLady.  I found FlyLady through Chinaberry Books, which was where I got a LOT of books for my kids.  It had a secondary market of selling a few books to moms – including the wonderful Sink Reflections by Marla Cilley – the FlyLady.  She has a wonderful website, FlyLady.net, where you can read her day’s flight plan and the week’s missions to get you on the track to having a clean, pretty happy home.  She gives out great advice, and I highly recommend both Sink Reflections and her website.  Now, if I stay with FlyLady like an alcoholic stays with AA, then my house would be clean.  Unfortunately, while it worked for me in bursts, it didn’t change my soul, so I was still a person trying desperately to de-clutter.  Also – she has really great microfiber cloths, but I suggest getting a huge pack of them from Costco.  Instead of buying 3 at a time, you’ll be thrilled to have more like 20.  Those things will clean anything.

After all those miscellaneous de-cluttering books, there were two books that really helped me.  The first is Breathing Room: Open Your Heart by Decluttering Your Home by Lauren Rosenfeld and Dr. Melva Green.  Breathing Room taught me to declutter my heart, my relationships and my home all together. Decluttering means you need to look at what you want from that space and taking out the things that don’t help you get to your goal.  You have to learn to let things go.  If you’re holding on to a dish that your aunt gave you, but every time you look at it you remember the mean things she said, then get rid of the dish!  It brings unhappiness into your life, and if you give it away, maybe it will bring happiness into the life of the person who buys it at a thrift shop.

The second book that helped me was one that I resisted strongly.  For a few years, you couldn’t help but see The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying UP: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo.  This bugged the dickens out of me.  It’s basically the same information as in Breathing Room, but in a much stricter presentation.  It reminds me of when Sudoku became hugely popular as a Japanese thing even though it was published earlier as Number Place in the US in 1979.  Let’s face it, Marie Kondo seems like an OCD personality who has managed to use her obsession to make a great business.  There were bits and pieces of her advice, though, that I’ve really adopted.  I know this sounds silly, but I now fold all my clothes in the Marie Kondo way.  No more piled up t-shirts in the drawer where I only ever pick one of the top three.  Now I have them folded and standing vertically so I can see every single one of them and pick out which one I want from the entire drawer.  I even fold my socks like she does!

Now I feel better at home.  It’s a place where I have pride in belonging.  I don’t dread the cleaning process anymore.  I take peace from living in the now, whether I am doing the dishes or reading a book.  A task isn’t a chore anymore, it’s part of the journey to get me in a better spot.  Making the bed is like active meditation.  Knowing what the result is, I don’t resent the effort to change my life.