The aspirational lightness of being, part 4
Last September I came down with a nasty mystery illness that lasted for eight days, and for various logistical reasons, no one was available to “minister to” me (LOLsob). On the third night I lay in the dark in a disgustingly sweat-sodden tangle of sheets, shivering violently even as my skin felt hot as a furnace, and it occurred to me that if I died, my sister (upon her return from a business trip) would have to sort through my mess. In the moment, of course, this thought seemed only a teensy bit melodramatic. I like to joke that I’m a stereotypical Scorpio—skipping blithely through life unafraid of death—but that night I had to call myself on my own BS:
I was scared.
A few weeks later, I found myself in the strange, sad position of sorting through the belongings of a friend who had passed away. My friend was a sweet and loving presence in my life, but he definitely did not “have his affairs in order.” The experience of going through his things—and not being able to find what his family needed (keys, will, etc.) within a reasonable length of time—threw the problem of clutter (both personal and professional) into even sharper relief for me.
If you click on the “aspirational minimalism” blog tag, you’ll see just how long I’ve been talking about wanting to be the sort of person who doesn’t feel like she’s constantly flailing amid waist-high piles of novel notes, books, and craft supplies. In my twenties and thirties, tidying was a seemingly simple matter of practicality and mental health. Work-wise, I figured the best I could realistically strive for was a state of functional chaos. (“You’re publishing another book? Well then, you must be organized enough!”) Now that I am technically “middle aged” (not really, but…kinda?!), there’s a newfound desire to, y’know…end well, insofar as such things are possible. This is why I am a little bit obsessed with The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (both the book and the streaming series), the point of which is very easy to distill into one sentence:
Dispense with your excess stuff NOW so your loved ones don’t have to deal with it when you’re dead.
If I am ever hit by a crosstown bus, here is a sampling of what my sister will have to trash, shred, or re-distribute via Freecycle:
A bin of unsorted project notes and smaller caches of scrap paper and post-its (usually tucked into birthday-card envelopes).
Another box containing medical and financial documents in no order whatsoever.
Unfinished knitting and sewing projects going back eight-plus years.
A trash bag’s worth of teeny fabric and yarn scraps intended for throw-pillow stuffing.
At the bottom of a stack of blank greeting cards, an international-Forever-stamped Christmas card I addressed to my friends Shelley and James in 2017 and have forgotten to mail every year since.
Broken doodads (Christmas ornaments, magnets, coasters) I’d intended to super-glue back together.
My space is fully functional; the mess could be a LOT worse. But I feel low-key shame about my many projects in limbo, my paper bins and catch-all bags, and shame is not a friend to creativity. Also, I am moving house later this year, so there’s never been a better time to deal with my shtuff.
The trickster side of my brain reads these labels as SORDID and UNSORDID.
I intend to keep writing publicly about my clutter because I would love to see more creative folks being candid about how we (attempt to) stay on top of our material, and because it seems to me that tidying advice for a general audience only half-applies to our situation. If I were a different sort of person—someone who didn’t operate at “an intense level of creativity” (to quote my therapist), with all the scribbling notes for future novels, the home library (because all writers are readers, and I like to make notes in my books), casting on for a new sweater and starting yet another quilt project for my best friend’s wedding gift, and indulging the urge to save every last bit of paper my niece has ever drawn on (which is even stronger now that she can write her name!), and the gardening and furniture-refinishing supplies in the back room, and let’s not forget my watercolor pencil set on the shelf in the closet and those chocolate molds at the bottom of the bottom kitchen drawer—it would be exponentially easier to keep a tidy house. That low-key shame is compounded by the irony that my creativity is inhibiting itself.
Do I wish I were the sort of person who doesn’t itch to make (and re-make) things, or that I could “tone down” these natural impulses? Of course not. It’s just that something at some step in my creative process is in need of tweaking.
Here’s the thing I didn’t quite understand yet, back when I was blogging about decluttering in 2015:
When we live in a state of creative possibility, dross is inevitable.
False starts, dead ends, and poop-outs aren’t evidence of our failures, they’re an ***occupational certainty.***
If you’ve been following my blog revival of late (thank you, friend!), you will have noticed a theme of setting healthier boundaries with oneself. The boundary here is: I must identify and dispose of the dross (recycle the outdated notes, frog the half-finished sweater and Freecycle the yarn, etc.) so I can focus on the projects I AM going to finish. DO THE THING, not just talk or blog about it, and go on identifying and responsibly-disposing-of on a consistent basis.
I Freecycled ALL! THIS! FABRIC! (and yarn!) before my move to D.C. in 2020. I low-key regret getting rid of a couple remnants in this photo, but it’s not as if I’d’ve used them in the intervening years. It was the right call.
Two more truths we arty folk could discuss more candidly:
1. Creative follow-through is all in the decision making: THIS book project, not THAT one. THIS pattern, not THAT one. Yellow, NOT blue. Which means that if you spend years deferring the choices that make you squirm, you could wind up smothered by your own potential. (Psychologically. Maybe literally, if you have that much yarn.)
2. It’s very hard not to look at an unfinished project in terms of the hours (and dollars) we’ve “wasted” on it, which means that the sunk-cost fallacy keeps us “persevering” when we ought to quit and pivot. If nothing else, it costs us energetically to spend years intending to finish something. This is how one ends up with a closetful of UFOs. (“UnFinished objects.” Not nearly as interesting, I know.)
It is the practice of a mature artist (a mature human!) to face her limits—24 hours in a day, 365* days in a year, an inescapable (if unreadable) countdown clock—and make decisions accordingly.
So over the next year, I intend to share my progress in posts on the following subtopics:
How I prioritized my list of knitting, sewing, and mending projects using Google Sheets and arranged my time in order to, y’know, actually finish them! (along with notes on overcoming the sunk-cost effect)
Re-organizing my supplies and UFOs for ease of worst-case-scenario donate-ability, storing like with like instead of a half dozen mixed-up bins (I’m going to call that post “The Awkward Art of Swedish Death Crafting.” Subtitle: “YOU’RE WELCOME, KATE!” 🤪)
Figuring out a new approach to processing paper so I actually follow through this time (…maybe?!?), and using Victoria Nelson’s adage about creative discipline (that it arises naturally out of honoring your deepest preferences) to figure out a note-taking and -sorting protocol I can stick with (understanding that I am and probably always will be an analog kind of girl, and am therefore not in the market for a tablet, app, etc.)
Organizing my writer’s archive [hopefully that sounds less pretentious than “literary papers”], part 1 (analog)
Organizing my writer’s archive, part 2 (digital)
Rethinking the home library, part 2: MOVING DAY! (how my “read and release” initiative turned out)
Rereading those “aspirational minimalism” posts from 2015, I’m tempted to sigh at the person who wrote, You gotta release everything that's over and done with to make space for all the exciting new stuff that's waiting to come into your life, or My new strategy is to bring all that stuff to the Writers' Room, parcel it into manageable chunks and go through one stack at the beginning or end of each writing session. We'll see how that goes. Spoiler: it didn’t!
On the other hand, the home-workspace photos I posted back then prove to me that, for the most part, I am tidier than I used to be. It’s also a lot easier to cut myself some slack for being a flawed and sometimes-flighty earthling. Nothing bad is going to happen if I don’t manage to clear out any of that paper, or only a few folders’ worth, before my next move. The most self-compassionate approach is to say that if I can share something here that someone else finds motivational or otherwise useful, I’ll consider this latest go-around at least a partial success.
