unicornduke replied to your post
Jun. 7th, 2018 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2Jqtfrs
unicornduke replied to your post “labor-intensive manual crosspost from pillowfort.io: I’m still trying…”
I know for me, once I get to a point where I can no longer find where things are, then it’s time to clean. It drives me absolutely wild if I can’t find something, like obsessively searching for it occurs until it’s found. I lost my wallet two weekends ago, and I could have just borrowed cash and driven without it. But I Could Not. I didn’t know where it was. Everything has to have their spots, even if it isn’t super organized. idek this shit is hard
I lived like that for a long time and it was enough, but sometime circa 2007 I blew past that point, in a haze of stress and overcommitment, and– before that, i’d been a student and a young worker early in my career, and I’d had things like school breaks and short periods between jobs and such, and I’d had chances to catch up. But I haven’t been unemployed since 2007, and I haven’t had a paid vacation in basically my adult life, and there just hasn’t been a chance. I’ve got so little time without other pressing commitments that when I do get a couple of days, I waste them fretting over how to best use my precious small amount of time, and then I go back to work with the house in a worse state than it was.
But that’s the long and short of it– I used to blitz-clean when it got bad and I couldn’t find things, and then I didn’t have time (actually I blame roller derby for that one, I went through a phase where I was out of the house from 8am until 11pm most days in a week including weekends), and now I’m so far beyond that state that I have no idea how to claw my way back even to just the point where I can’t find things. I’m to the point where there are whole segments of rooms I can’t use, and everything in them is Off The Mental Map and I don’t know what’s in there. It’s bad, it’s really bad.
And I don’t know how to fix it but it’s pretty clear that “throw everything away and start over” is not really the sort of thing one can do at mid-life. Especially since most of the stuff I would be throwing away is stuff I acquired deliberately, even painstakingly. But I can’t figure out where to begin to curate it, or even to re-index it, and every effort I make only worsens things because now I’ve got the beginnings of a new organizational system and no time to be consistent with it.
Sigh.
(Your picture was not posted)
unicornduke replied to your post “labor-intensive manual crosspost from pillowfort.io: I’m still trying…”
I know for me, once I get to a point where I can no longer find where things are, then it’s time to clean. It drives me absolutely wild if I can’t find something, like obsessively searching for it occurs until it’s found. I lost my wallet two weekends ago, and I could have just borrowed cash and driven without it. But I Could Not. I didn’t know where it was. Everything has to have their spots, even if it isn’t super organized. idek this shit is hard
I lived like that for a long time and it was enough, but sometime circa 2007 I blew past that point, in a haze of stress and overcommitment, and– before that, i’d been a student and a young worker early in my career, and I’d had things like school breaks and short periods between jobs and such, and I’d had chances to catch up. But I haven’t been unemployed since 2007, and I haven’t had a paid vacation in basically my adult life, and there just hasn’t been a chance. I’ve got so little time without other pressing commitments that when I do get a couple of days, I waste them fretting over how to best use my precious small amount of time, and then I go back to work with the house in a worse state than it was.
But that’s the long and short of it– I used to blitz-clean when it got bad and I couldn’t find things, and then I didn’t have time (actually I blame roller derby for that one, I went through a phase where I was out of the house from 8am until 11pm most days in a week including weekends), and now I’m so far beyond that state that I have no idea how to claw my way back even to just the point where I can’t find things. I’m to the point where there are whole segments of rooms I can’t use, and everything in them is Off The Mental Map and I don’t know what’s in there. It’s bad, it’s really bad.
And I don’t know how to fix it but it’s pretty clear that “throw everything away and start over” is not really the sort of thing one can do at mid-life. Especially since most of the stuff I would be throwing away is stuff I acquired deliberately, even painstakingly. But I can’t figure out where to begin to curate it, or even to re-index it, and every effort I make only worsens things because now I’ve got the beginnings of a new organizational system and no time to be consistent with it.
Sigh.
(Your picture was not posted)
