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Organized Space = Organized Headspace
Dec. 31st, 2018 08:53 amI’ve just spent about two hours cleaning my garage and my den. And I feel immeasurably better.
I broke down a huge mound of recycling that had been littering the house and garage in the chaos around Christmas (LOTS of boxes), along with just taking out a lot of accumulated regular recycling that tends to stack up around the house. I put some bulk trash items out of the way to save for next day so I actually had room to rearrange things, shelved items that had been stacked on the floor, and swept the garage out so I would no longer track dead leaves into the house. I can’t tell you what a damn relief it is to no longer have just an impenetrable mound of crap cluttering up the front of my garage, and now that I’ve put some lawn/snow equipment in better places, I won’t be tripping over them when I get things out of my car.
My den was cleared of trash, items were organized, I vacuumed to a fair-thee-well, even pulling out my desk to clear it of things that had fallen behind it. Sorting out books and office supplies will wait until later, but at least everything is in the right quadrant of the shelves or drawers.
I also winnowed out every work shirt that has a hole in it with an eye to sewing them up. I work in heavy industry (aluminum rolling mill), and my t-shirts do tend to get ripped or the seams give way under the arms. Since it’s a factory, no one really gives two poops if your shirts are ripped or dirty, but it’s something I can fix and I’ll feel better knowing I won’t be giving anyone accidental peek-a-boos, even if through a dime-sized hole. Besides, if I fix the shirts, then I can spend money on new work jeans instead!
As I find the motivation to do this, I feel better and better. There’s always a correlation between downturns in my mood/resurgences of my depression and my spaces being messy. If I’m on the computer in my messy den, I tend to flutter around the internet, mostly killing time instead of doing some other things I’ve been meaning to do, like write. The garage is generally my entry into the house, and being confronted with a four-foot-high mound of stuff doesn’t really set the mood for being productive.
Every time I’m able to set one of my physical spaces right, even if it’s just organizing one stack of papers, throwing away a few bits of trash, or rearranging a couple of things, I can feel a little bit more of my mind and spirit calm and realign into something other than a mess of simultaneous apathy and restlessness.
I’m kicking my depression in the tail, with garbage bags, brooms, vacuums, and organizational skills!
I broke down a huge mound of recycling that had been littering the house and garage in the chaos around Christmas (LOTS of boxes), along with just taking out a lot of accumulated regular recycling that tends to stack up around the house. I put some bulk trash items out of the way to save for next day so I actually had room to rearrange things, shelved items that had been stacked on the floor, and swept the garage out so I would no longer track dead leaves into the house. I can’t tell you what a damn relief it is to no longer have just an impenetrable mound of crap cluttering up the front of my garage, and now that I’ve put some lawn/snow equipment in better places, I won’t be tripping over them when I get things out of my car.
My den was cleared of trash, items were organized, I vacuumed to a fair-thee-well, even pulling out my desk to clear it of things that had fallen behind it. Sorting out books and office supplies will wait until later, but at least everything is in the right quadrant of the shelves or drawers.
I also winnowed out every work shirt that has a hole in it with an eye to sewing them up. I work in heavy industry (aluminum rolling mill), and my t-shirts do tend to get ripped or the seams give way under the arms. Since it’s a factory, no one really gives two poops if your shirts are ripped or dirty, but it’s something I can fix and I’ll feel better knowing I won’t be giving anyone accidental peek-a-boos, even if through a dime-sized hole. Besides, if I fix the shirts, then I can spend money on new work jeans instead!
As I find the motivation to do this, I feel better and better. There’s always a correlation between downturns in my mood/resurgences of my depression and my spaces being messy. If I’m on the computer in my messy den, I tend to flutter around the internet, mostly killing time instead of doing some other things I’ve been meaning to do, like write. The garage is generally my entry into the house, and being confronted with a four-foot-high mound of stuff doesn’t really set the mood for being productive.
Every time I’m able to set one of my physical spaces right, even if it’s just organizing one stack of papers, throwing away a few bits of trash, or rearranging a couple of things, I can feel a little bit more of my mind and spirit calm and realign into something other than a mess of simultaneous apathy and restlessness.
I’m kicking my depression in the tail, with garbage bags, brooms, vacuums, and organizational skills!
