I believe it is fairly well documented that clutter and mess cause anxiety. I considered researching it and providing citations for this blog, but I didn’t 🤷🏻‍♀️. So you’ll have to either take my word for it or research it yourself 😂. Another thing I neglected to research, but mostly remember from my psych minor, is that the human brain literally does not have the capacity to process everything that it sees all the time, so it will ignore things it doesn’t think are important. Our current living conditions lead to an interesting mix of these phenomena.

Being in the midst of all this stuff all the time, it’s like you are aware of it, but you don’t always see it. You get used to just living around it. You stop tripping over and bumping into things, and just walk over or around them without conscious effort. Until something changes your perspective. Carry a big ‘ol bin through that over-full hallway, and you can’t not bump into things. Clean one area or object, and the mess surrounding it comes into hyperfocus. You will literally become aware of things that you have walked by a hundred times but have never consciously seen.

The anxiety is similar in a way I am having difficulty articulating. It’s not an obvious anxiety, like worry about an upcoming exam or stress at work. But it’s also not general anxiety with no definitive cause. You know it’s there, but you can’t see it all the time or you’d just go crazy 🤪. It comes out – James and I have both been having a great deal of trouble sleeping, and we can be snippy with each other and the kids at odd times. But it is not always obvious or clear.

One thing that’s particularly interesting to me, for both the stuff and the anxiety around it, is that I am often very aware of its absence, in a way that I am not as aware of its presence. I mentioned that we’ve started using a third-floor bedroom as our hang-out space. When we started coming up here, there was a bunch of random stuff at the bottom of third-floor staircase, including a bag of shoes with half of it’s contents spilling out across the bottom step. The rubber sole of one of said shoes had disintegrated and there were bits of rubber strewn across the path at the very bottom of the steps. These bits ranged in size from about thumb-sized down to grains of sand. For weeks we just walked over it. Then I cleaned it up. It’s so refreshing seeing that space clean and empty, it’s like taking a yogic breath every time I walk through instead of over. And it’s such a small space 🤣.

We have been quite productive this week. Cleaning that spot on the stairs was part of a larger project of carving a path through the back staircase.

Now we can go directly from the kitchen to the third floor, instead of walking all the way to the front of the house and back to use the main stairs… this house is big, ya’ll. It’s a lot of walking to go from the kitchen to the third floor via the main stairs 🙃🤣

We also ordered our third dumpster, and we’ve been pulling garbage, primarily from the basement and third floor. This is mostly stuff that wasn’t garbage when it was first collected-like the shoes with the deteriorated rubber sole I mentioned above, various textiles with mouse and/or moth damage, crushed boxes and bins, and other kinds of damage that happen over time to things that are neglected or misused 🤷🏻‍♀️. We do occasionally find actual garbage mixed in – a Tide bottle in the upstairs parlor, a chewed-up lollipop stick (with Candy still stuck to it 😝) in a box of books, half a bottle of very old Nyquil in a box of shoes, you know, normal stuff 🤔🙃.

The percentage of the stuff that is garbage is pretty small, but there is just so much stuff, that there is quite a lot of garbage at this point 😳. The more garbage that we pull, the more room we have to move and organize the stuff that isn’t garbage. Ultimately, we would also like to get most of the not garbage out of the house as well. That will of course be a much more involved process 🫠. For now, every thing that goes out of the house is a win. Every bit of space we recover gives us more room to maneuver and manipulate, giving us a little more room to breathe.