The Task

Luxy Hair‘s 30 Day Self Care Challenge, Day 1: Declutter a room or workspace.

Read more about this journey in my introductory post.

Before

My bedroom is a disaster. Occasionally there is a path to my bed. The rest of the time, I’m stepping over piles of junk. No matter how many times my room gets organized, it turns back into a hoarded hell.

I am coming clean. I have too much stuff.

For the past five years, I’ve lived in two locations. Near my college campus and the family home. Over that time I accumulated many things. Now that I’ve graduated and I’m back living full time in the dollhouse (what I call our home), there is no room for two living spaces-full of stuff.

My room is too disastrous to try to declutter in a single day. I’ve tried. Unless Matt Paxton is showing up at my door, I’m going to have to pick a smaller area. Thus, I am choosing to create a definitive path from the door to my bed, and I’ll be clearing my bedside table.

I’m writing the first half of this blog before any pickup starts, and I will not edit it (save for grammar and sentence flow) after I am finished with the project. I will not go back and change the goals I’ve set out for myself so they can fit the end product.

The specific goals are as follows.

• My bedside table having nothing but:
  • Lamp
  • Chargers
  • iPad & phone (Samsung Galaxy Note8)
  • Medications
  • Water bottle
  • Gratitude journal
  • Dream journal
• Get my hamper out of the laundry room (basement), fill it with the dirty clothes everywhere on my floor, and put it back in my bathroom where it lives.
• Empty the 2 completely full trash cans.
• Throw away all wrappers between door and bed, bed and bathroom.
• Sweep.

After

After three hours of working with Arrested Development playing in the background, I was able to see (this section) of my floor in its entirety. Books and clothes and wrappers are no longer strewn across the ground in a crude metaphor for my mental state.

When I first saw that I would have to be practicing decluttering on the first day of my self-care journey, I was grumpy. I am, clearly, not a neat person. I want to be, and I love the way I feel when I have a clean work/living space, but I’ve found that growing up with cluttered surroundings is a hard circle to break.

For the past few hours, I’ve been loving my clutter-free workspace! I was able to claim the warranty on a product that’s been broken for months but couldn’t find the receipt to do so. I didn’t put off peeing because it would be too difficult to stumble over things to get to the bathroom. I am living free!

Being honest with yourself is an important part of self-care, so a realistic admission states that the room will be messy again before it is totally cleaned. Let’s say, for now, I’m cautiously optimistic that it could stay this way.

Question of the Day:

Q: Do you watch/have you ever watched Arrested Development? Who is your favorite character?

A: I like Maeby.