I've tried decluttering, but I can't seem to make or sustain progress.
-This was me!
There are endless books about organization (an overused and oft-misunderstood term), written by people to whom being tidy comes naturally. In all likelihood you've read (or listened to) one or more of these books and either felt too overwhelmed and alienated by the advice that you didn't even try to apply the strategies, or tried and failed, which left you feeling hopeless. Maybe you've bought or taken these books out of the library, but never actually managed to read them. Nothing like losing a decluttering book in the clutter to make you feel like a lost cause!
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There is a lot of decluttering and organizing advice out there that doesn't work for the majority of people who struggle in this area. Just ask my husband how many times I've loudly shouted "ha!" or actually started laughing while consuming books on this subject.
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Please don't lose hope! Strategies that will work for you DO exist, you CAN make progress, and you ARE more capable than you believe, you've just never been taught in a way that works for you. And there's no fault in that.
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My Story
I'm a naturally cluttered person. I don't automatically put things away when I am done with them, and I don't really see clutter until the doorbell rings. Sound familiar?
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Having said that, I wouldn't say that I actually STRUGGLED with clutter until my early 30s. In my late teens and for most of my twenties I moved a lot and shared space with housemates. A lot of my "stuff" lived in boxes at my parents' house, and I had people to keep me accountable to tidy common areas. I did love a pile though! Okay, several piles.
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In my year approaching 30 my partner and I bought a house and my parents excitedly dropped off the six thousand (small exaggeration) boxes from my childhood they had been stockpiling in their basement. Over the next two years we added two kids and a dog to the mix. My brain couldn't keep up with all the added space and things that were all of a sudden supposed to be under my control. Let me tell you, they were not. Tiny baby clothes leapt out of drawers at will, dirty dishes multiplied like we had invisible house guests for every meal, and there was no "surface" on the surfaces, like, ever. When on earth was I supposed to manage all these objects when I had toddlers and babies that seemed to either need me or to be intent on undoing any progress I managed to make and a dog to walk and feed twice a day who undermined all the vacuuming I claimed to be doing? I'm aware of the crazy run-on sentence -- it captures the overwhelm nicely.
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So I set about "organizing". I moved things around, I created categories and systems and I had the best intentions. Those spaces I "organized", they looked GOOD, for like a week (if I was lucky). After many failed attempts at this, I had to accept a hard reality: I had more stuff than I could manage. You (or somebody you know) probably does too, or you wouldn't have ended up here. Since then I came across a fitting analogy: "like rearranging deck chairs on The Titanic." The ship was going down whether I liked it or not, time spent organizing was simply wasted time.
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I needed to declutter. I had thought I was doing that along with my organizing. Did no one see how I threw out that almost-empty packet of gummies from three years ago at the back of the pantry? Need I dispose of MORE? Realizing I must not truly understand this decluttering thing, I did what has become habit as a perpetual student -- I researched. I read every book and listened to every podcast on the subject I could find. I became a student of decluttering, and (some of) my teachers knew their stuff! Armed with the invaluable teachings of, at that point almost entirely, Dana K. White, a fellow clutterer who had dug her own way out and lived to tell the tale, I began to declutter. For real this time. It was not lightning speed, but it wasn't terrifying or complicated or even entirely unpleasant. I was doing it. I was decluttering! You know when you're on a plane and you're going to take off but you're not 100% sure when the taking off actually takes place, and then you look out the window and you're high in the sky and kind of shocked? It was like that. And once I had worked through an area it looked GOOD, but this time the work didn't undo itself in a matter of days. I felt like a magician. And that was just the beginning.
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Spoiler, there's no actual magic. But if you're a person whose home leaves you feeling baffled and exhausted, or you have more stuff than you know what to do with but you can never actually find anything, successful decluttering will FEEL like magic. Since that lightbulb moment of knowing I had way too much stuff and starting to dig my way out, I've rarely lost the excitement for it. Some days I'm maintaining the progress I've made, some days I'm learning about the psychology behind clutter or piecing out what I love from the advice of "experts" and rolling my eyes at the rest, and some days I'm teaching other people how to declutter, helping them understand themselves, and showing them what they're capable of. That's my favourite. Excited about decluttering yet? Come on! I am.​
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