My biggest challenge in life.

So, way back in November of ’06, I wrote (but never poster the following):

Crawling from the wreckage.

So, I’ve been laboring away, just digging out. Digging out is a very apt description of my labors over the last several weeks. There is just an abundance of mess needing to go through, I never bought into the scorched Earth school of cleaning but, I can certainly see where clutter is something to be avoided.

I was speaking to a cousin the other day and she was relaying the horror of dealing with an in-laws level of clutter. It was the kind of clutter where everything gets thrown into a room, never to be used but, there... just in case. I know this well. Speaking from my own experience (although hopefully not to such a degree) as well as what I have witnessed though the years.

Many years ago, I worked at a large bookseller - at the time it was a considerably smaller operation than it is today. One of my fellow employees was facing eviction because fire inspectors had gained access to his West Village studio apartment and found it to be a fire hazard. I think the landlord was quite happy about the situation because my co-worker was enjoying a particularly low rent for a very nice part of town.

Still, his place was a fire hazard. In a studio that was roughly 750 square feet or so, he had books. Now, when I say he had books, you think, “So? What’s the big deal?’

No, HE HAD BOOKS!

Books, books, books and more books, his place didn’t have any furniture that you could see in the space at all. All it had was books, piled, strewn, everywhere (lord knows where or how he slept there), coming up to almost chest high. Over the next week, several of us took it upon ourselves to go by his apartment after work and spend several hours collecting the books, stacking the books, boxing or bagging the books (which I believe ultimately wound up at Strand). Each night for five or six nights, three or four of us would be over there digging out. It was simply amazing. It also was my first exposure to clutter on a grand scale. A year later the same friend would need help again doing the exact same thing as he had once again amassed a collection of gigantic proportions and was again facing eviction. Obviously, it was a sign of something else, something deeper going on inside of him but, it wasn’t the first or only time I would see something like this happen.

I have another friend out on the west coast who is stricken with a similar malady. I have given up trying to convince him that were he to quit his job and not set foot from his house and spend the remainder of his days reading, he would not be able to make his way through all the books he has amassed. As a matter of fact although he labors away in perpetual toil just this side of poverty. He maintains storage space for his library. He actually pays to keep his treasured books somewhere in addition to paying rent. It’s sad.

So, my clutter is much the same although I find myself desperately wanting to do all within my power to dispel it. See, I have noticed that when the clutter is gone and things are clean and orderly, it seems to be a reflection of my own mental state.

Sometime in between the time I wrote that original post and today, I happened upon the Squalor Survivor website. Reading through that site I rapidly came to the conclusion that it was describing a problem I had had for years. A problem that while not getting worse was impeding me and needed to be addressed. A year and a half later the battle still goes on. They say the first step in correcting any problem is recognizing that you have one.

Recently, I went out and purchased two books because I am actually very serious about overcoming these tendencies.



...and I put the links up to the books

The EYOC was a bit that way and I used to write it off to his having grown up through the depression. When he became ill, one of my priorities was sorting through all he had amassed to find important papers and the like. The odd thing is it seems to be a lot easier sorting through someone else’s mess than it ever is sorting through your own mess.

I did that easily enough but over the last two years I have made some progress in that area for myself but, still not as much as I would like.

Anyway... so I started this, left it unfinished and came back to it only to leave it in the draft folder again.

George Carlin did a routine on this a number of times through the years and it morphed but it’s still a good starting point:

 

 

Other people’s stuff is shit and your shit is stuff!

In life, we are on a bell curve of stuff... we come into the world with nothing, find desires foisted upon us to amass more and more and then get to a point where we have to push ourselves away like someone pushing themself away from a table after being a glutton. Thing is you can’t throw up and flush your possessions, now you just have a bunch of things you need to figure out something to do with.

I’ve struggled with this throughout my life and I have no question that it all arises from an upbringing of poverty where I had little.

Today more than a decade later I still struggle with this... junk! Things that need to be sorted, tossed, donated, sold, trashed! None of it is fun to do and that’s the problem because you have to force yourself to sit own and do this work. There are times when I’m more productive and there are times when I’m not.

It seems to me, the times that the clutter is at an ebb reflect my own mood and mental state. If I’m overwhelmed, then the clutter builds like a tide that flows in but it flows in more like a tsunami.

Right now, being home for a year I have no excuses really. The big problem I have though is it seems I spend more and more and more time sleeping. Maybe something is wrong with me, maybe it’s the depression, maybe it’s just that I sometimes feel like shit but the truth of it is I accomplish far less than I want to be and I don’t have an answer to address that problem.