A different way of thinking...

I was raised in a house where there was a place for everything and everything was in its place. Yet my brain has always rebelled and it was something I could not embrace.

Every home we lived in, as I was growing up, was a mix of cream, pale wood, and artless decoration. The furniture was positioned on arrival and didn’t move again until our departure. Dishes were done promptly. Bathrooms were cleaned on Wednesday. There were no items with which to clutter a house that could have been a showroom.

My parents designated each object its spot in our world and when you were done using that item you returned it where it belonged. The only problem was that my entire way of being didn’t have a spot in their immaculate living.

I was always assigned the smaller room, which I pretended to prefer. I did like to feel cozy, it made me feel safe, to have the walls close, not too much open space. And I liked that they often had bad natural light because mornings were not my friends, I preferred the night. My furniture rearranged on a monthly basis. I made secret hiding places between my desk and my draws and you could not see my walls for all the clippings and posters upon them that soothed my mind and soul.

In those small rooms, I would always make my noise, keep my hours and be myself. But upon emergence, I had to blend in with the visitors to our house, be beige, or cream, or else.

Their rules seemed simple and so I was as confused as them when the schedule for cleaning, so obviously simple, felt like pulling nails out from beneath my fingers. I knew the home of everything we owned and yet to return them to their spot was strangely impossible. And when it came time to be beige and blend in, I couldn’t seem to control my words or volume.

If you haven’t guessed, that’s okay neither did I, I lived with undiagnosed ADHD most of my life. I craved the clutter, and spoke too loud; I made noise in the silence and colored my life. Every item I owned had not one home but ten, and I considered it an accomplishment if you could find a clean surface.

The rules I had been taught would simply never work for me, my brain had a different way of functioning. Now that I knew that, it was obviously time, for endless suggestions from others and unsolicited advice.

Minimalism was proposed as a solution, more than once, apparently it would solve everything and so it was a trend that everyone seemed to jump on. But with as many hobbies as I had and things I liked to collect, all my items brought me joy and I couldn’t get rid of them.

Another suggestion was to put the mess away; if no one else could see it then it was okay. But thanks to a lovely little trick called object permanence, I’d forget I already owned it and end up with ten of the same thing.

Another suggested that I just give up, stop trying to do anything, and live as I want. This was the closest to good advice I can say that I got, but to me, that was a slippery slide to becoming a hoarder. And we know from endless research the brain does better and stays healthy with some kind of order.

Since I knew none of these ‘great ideas’ would work, I did the other thing I had learned. I looked for the times in my life when things had made sense and then from there I began.

Never was I more at home than in The Studio. It was a grand name for a small shack, sitting on an uneven slab, out the back, on the farm we always called home no matter where we were. It was built as somewhere to put any excess stuff so the house could remain clean, and as it turned out, I was excessive in the extreme.

It was not designed to be lived in, merely a place to keep the artistic things. But it soon became clear art was my life, and so it was where I spent all of my time. My belongings slowly migrated, without my permission, until the only reason I entered the house was to use the bathroom or because I was asked. And this is where I learned my big secret to my version of clean; rewrite what that means.

There are many different ways to live and so there’s really only one rule. Design your life as it works for you. Start with your goals and then find a method to get through, and make sure at every stage, it’s something you can do.

My aim was simple, to be able to find all my stuff without a daylong journey to remember where it was put. But to recognize that an exact spot was perhaps beyond my ability when I was all riled up. And so I came up with quadrants, and designated draws but recognized when you opened them they’d be a mess to all but one.

If I wanted to clean, I had to be near the thing that was dirty and then try to do something else that was super boring. And then, only so I could avoid the task I had been assigned, would my dishes suddenly sparkle with pride.

Things put away were always a pleasant surprise when I found them again, so if I needed to use them, they had to be out in the open. But since I didn’t want to spend all my days staring at a mess I arranged the items so they looked decorative.

Making my bed will never be a task that is simply completed. And when you open my draws nothing is folded. Unless of course, I have an assignment I don’t want to do in which case they are not only stacked neatly but color-coordinated too. And in every room, is a spot designated to catch all when my speedy little brain won’t stop to sort things that day.

This is what works for me, it may not work for you. Every brain is different even when they’re not neuro-divergent. De-clutter if you wish, hell try out minimalism. Or fill your life with all the stuff you want to see. There isn’t a right way to live. You only need to find how you want to be.

And so this organizational tip is in fact more a reminder you could just let it go. Not everyone was designed to live in a perfect showroom.