I'm absolutely whipped. I've spent the whole evening going through boxes and boxes of stuff, sorting papers, throwing things out, making piles to go to other places, and generally facing the disaster of my life here. I had a 6-ft high storage unit packed full of stuff, which has now been reduced to 3 small well-organized baskets, all of which fit neatly on my desk shelves (cleared for the occasion). I've gotten rid of several garbage bags' worth of stuff. I even made a box of gifts and things I'm willing to let go of, but I need someone else to throw out for me.
And yet I feel zero accomplishment. I feel like I've just been wandering through my hopelessly disorganized life, trying desperately to find something meaningful or to justify all the junk I've been keeping. I'm sick of things, and I'm sick of having so many things that I can't live my life or enjoy myself. I'm sick of what having so many things costs me.
I guess in a lot of ways, spring cleaning is not just a physical activity to make one's life more inhabitable, but also a psychological necessity, a way to drag out the things you've been shoving away and force yourself to deal with them. I don't like the person I see through the ephemera of my life.
I'm not sure how many of you saw the short-lived NBC sitcomCommitted, but the apartment episode was particularly memorable for me. The male lead Nate was an obsessive-compulsive genius who kept all these books and scraps of paper and all kinds of junk in his apartment, stacked up to the ceiling with only narrow paths between piles to get to furniture and other rooms. It's seriously horrifying. So he meets free-spirited Marni, whacky romance ensues, and eventually she says that she'd like to see his apartment, which of course strikes intense fear in Nate because he doesn't want her to know how strange and messy he is. She breaks into his apartment with a friend before he agrees to show her and is looking around, saying it's beautiful, that it's like being inside his brain. She's totally enthralled, and it becomes evident that she is supposed to be the perfect woman for him because she gets him and adores his idiosyncrasies.
They sneak out, and then a few days later after staying up day and night on end cleaning and getting rid of everything, Nate invites Marni over to a now-sterilized, completely normal-looking apartment with almost nothing in it. She looks around confused and disappointed, and I think eventually admits that she'd seen how it had been and that was who she loved, but that this utterly normal, conventional person isn't interesting at all. La la, crazy people sex, everyone is happy. (I liked that show damnit.)
Why I've mentioned this is that I can't look at all my clutter without knowing that I'm looking at my brain... and I hate that. I also know that Eric has been spending all his days in the office, overwhelmed with these mountains of just, crap, and I can't imagine that by now he doesn't feel the same disgust and loathing for everything that goes on in here. It's... distressing, to say the very least.
I also realize how many things I haven't done because I couldn't find the supplies (but knew I had them) or forgotten completely about. So many major anxieties could have been avoided by keeping my paperwork organized. I would not have had to live with an old cable receiver and modem in a box next to my desk for close to a year if I had just located the damn return sticker they sent. It's intensely frustrating... though now that I've found things and finally sorted a year's (or more) worth of disaster, I can address all this stuff and just get it out of my head. That is a sort of beautiful relief.
Of course it's not all bad. Moving furniture around has put the kitties into a wonderful state of hilarity.
Iggy thinks that the top of a wire shelf is the perfect place for a cat to hang out. And Smokey has decided he'll sleep on the coffee table for now. Weirdoes.
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