The Road to Decluttering

So today I am embarking on something new: I'm cleaning my bathroom tonight. Ok, that's not new-new. I mean, I've cleaned my bathroom before. No, really, I have. But tonight is (hopefully) the beginning of a shifting set of habits. See, I have a clutter problem. It's not Hoarder-level, but it's something that has been in my life for my entire life. I remember being in high school, and a girlfriend coming over to hang out with me while I cleaned my room. When I was done, I said, "What do you think?" and she responded, "You just moved all the piles around." Pretty sure my mom felt that way too, as I was growing up.

The reasons I do this run deep, and I have to fight pretty hard to have some compassion for myself in this regard, instead of shame. (Um, this is why I can't watch Hoarders, actually--the times I've tried, the folks looked so ashamed, and I'm convinced that this is an inappropriate response, though understandable.) That's partly why I'm putting this out there a little publicly. I suspect there are many more folks out there with clutter problems than folks think there are. Also, it has become pretty apparent that being "social" about something one is trying to change, sharing that stuff with others in a community of sorts, helps enable one to actually change (I'm looking at you, Crossfit). So here I am. Changing. Look at me.

But also, I find this part of my personality kind of morbidly fascinating. I look back at my family history, and I see that clutter may be the thing I had most in common with my grandfather. He wasn't a hoarder in the traditional sense, I think, because he had entire acres of land on which to spread out his clutter--he was a farmer for a good part of his life, but when I knew him he was also/mostly a "junk man". He would go out to people's homes and work spaces and cart off old radiators, tractors and the like. He would take them apart and sell the scrap--at least, he would do this sometimes. But he would also keep a lot of the stuff, partly in hopes of the price of a certain metal going up, but partly because "it might be useful someday". Some of this was Great Depression mentality in play, I think. But I'm pretty sure that part of it was biological. He had huge piles of tractor parts, car parts, parts of things I had no idea what they were, out back behind the house on the farm, just next to fields of corn. I learned to ride my first bike next to those old, rusty piles of junk that my grandfather collected (not really a smart place to learn to ride a bike, by the way). I fended off hornets that lived in those piles. Is it any wonder that I move piles of paper around my house at 41?

And yet. My mother is not this way at all. She has gone in the other direction in many ways, making sure that she doesn't have too much crap, keeping things clean and tidy. So I have hope that I can shift this stuff. And I'm working on it. Over the next few months I'm (perhaps) going to chronicle my attempts at creating new habits. But we'll see. There's a way in which blog posts (and journals) are just more piles of stuff. Perhaps I'll do away with them as well...

ps: After I wrote this, I realized I had written a very similar post about four years ago. Yeah. The clutter of the mind is the hardest to whittle away. :)