Where have I been for weeks now? Alternating between home decluttering to downsize and digging through my digital and hard copy archives. When moved to do so, I write about what I find, so there are plenty of posts ready to be published. I just haven’t actually pulled the trigger on that… inexplicably, given retirement now affords me all the time to write what I want and post on my own website. But then, that is how clutter robs you of energy and rational thought.
It can overwhelm you. So, you look to social media and short tips. You hope there’s like a magic horoscope just for you, something uncomfortable but accurate and helpful.
I didn’t actually need advice. I stood at a ‘foldable task table’ I got at Canadian Tire for projects, repacking a set of Royal Doulton Lambethware chocolate brown stoneware mugs, with saucers. Yet again. The 1978 purchase was photographed and offered for sale in the usual instant and free locations, along with Rosenthal Crystal single-footed raised glassware designed by Tapio Wirkkala a Finnish craftsman, long gone and some original functional crafts from my 25 years as publicist of Western Canada’s largest handcraft sale.
At the edges of the table, and around my ankles, are multiple plastic crates of varying size with piles of files crying for my attention. I negotiate with them like they had feelings. Well, they do. They hold all the feelings and details I managed to record from my uni years, through the divorce years in particular, my freelance career as a writer and marketer and even now, the sporadic sessions of seemingly important notes, written or typed.
What I RE-LEARNED
I stand alone in the piles, but you don’t have to, and you don’t have to do it all at once.
This is the one I have to relearn every single Tuesday. I schedule entire days for decluttering, like I’m going to descend on forty years of accumulated life with a clipboard and a ruthless heart, and then I do twenty minutes and need to lie down. Turns out twenty minutes, done honestly, beats a mythical day that never arrives. I resent the to-do list I write days earlier, for being right. I also want a fancier clipboard and a hook on which to hang it because the nature of the work and the decisions must all be made by me. So in place of help that can’t come because it is my life in text that I am editing, I at least want a pretty clipboard and a special place for it.
Our space reflects the season of our life, and I am in my 3rd, possibly last act, and it scares me, a little.
This is the one that actually stops me mid-motion. I keep finding objects that were absolutely correct for a person I no longer am — a version of me who lived somewhere else, cooked for more people, needed things for reasons that have simply expired. It’s strange to hold proof of your own change in your hands. Not sad, exactly. Just oddly formal, like being introduced to yourself at a party. Then you move on to the next artefact and identity. If you can.
It’s all far more emotional than you expect, yet again, because I know better
Nobody warns you that an old intact geometry set and slide rule you never mastered before Texas Instruments made them obsolete can undo you. I’ve had more unscheduled feelings this month over my kitchen drawers where I go for respite from the equally emotional file boxes, than I’ve had in actual therapy. Guilt about money spent not just on stuff. Stuff I can choose to sell, donate or gift. This is grief dressed up as a coat I never wore – the one of possibility as I invested in courses or books or programs with potential. Potential roles I procrastinated on to death and never completed.
Then there’s the occasional flash of anger at myself for keeping something “just in case” I get to it and create a written legacy from it or something publishable for the right market and audience. It’s all in there, filed under hope and sometimes housewares.
Try for quick decisions and be ruthless.
If I can read it without glasses on or there is a date, it seems to grow roots right through my fingers back into the boxes. Touching history is tough. For others, not so much, but I have a writer’s imagination that can instantly spin purpose and potential from any prose that comes to my hand.
Turns out ruthlessness isn’t about loving some item less, or knowing that something I wrote or created is a beacon of truth to another time. It’s about finally being honest about who I am now and what is truly possible and desired going forward. I don’t have enough time to catalogue the whole library of piles and files that carry traces of me in other seasons.
Decluttering the stuff or editing the written evidence of life isn’t about perfection.
I am making room to breathe, even if alone, on this coast, at this age. Some days “progress” looks like one drawer and a lot of self-talk as I turn to the alternate job of reducing my paper pile du jour, at least by 30%. That still counts.
And now, what no professional procrastinator needs to be told. Take breaks.
It’s not the run-for-your-life-now kind of break. It’s not an escape from the task break. It’s a predetermined, well-deserved break to refresh and reward. I set a timer. I set a goal of the space or the category I will clear, be it stuff or writing.
The day may end with an aching back, a half-sorted pile, and a mood that’s gone from “productive” to “why do I keep things at all?” Rest isn’t the interruption to this work. It is the work, same as the letting go.
If decluttering were a gym workout to build muscle, we would know that the real growth happens during the rest period. Then we can get up and see the new state. Marvel at it and have pride and motivation to continue.
Morale of my story as I stand deep in it, still?
It’s never about the objects or the journals. It’s like this slow-motion inventory of every version of myself I’ve been — the one who needed the matching sets, or the fancy notepads, or what I kept “just in case” because she didn’t yet trust that she’d remember what needed to be preserved and that she could let go of the evidence of any era.
Then there’s the story in the stuff. Each piece I hold up to today’s light and the story I may have outgrown but hadn’t gotten around to closing.
When I look around and imagine what someone coming onto my activity stage might see, I shudder. If my space truly reflects my season of life, what is it saying about me? But first, what is it saying to me?
It’s telling me I’m allowed to go slow, allowed to feel more than anyone I expected or that others might feel, and I am allowed to stop when I am truly tired.
The peace is the point. Not the empty shelf. And it will take as long as it takes.
How do YOU handle your files and piles or memories and the need to make room for more of life ahead of you?
