Well. I fell off the blog wagon again. Typical. I haven't posted for several weeks. And then because I was off the blog wagon I felt like a failure and that completely psyched me out of getting back on the blog wagon. So here we are. Thanks for the endless patience you extend to my wayward blogging ways.
I think that's one reason I have returned over and over to this blog: it feels like a judgement free zone. Of course, I judge MYSELF very harshly and am not a very good friend to me sometimes, but I always feel like you guys never judge me and this web page never judges me.
Thanks for that.
Right before I stopped blogging for a spell I made a few illustrations of my newly organized studio to share with you. I had spent about a week tearing everything up and putting it all back together again.
The result is much more peaceful and tidy. I feel less distracted by the clutter and better able to actually work in here.
I have always been a messy person. I am messy when I am making things (glue, paint, glitter, string...EVERYWHERE!) but I am also messy about cooking, laundry bed making and everything.
I feel like I spent my whole life feeling trapped by my own messiness and I have been searching for the cure for so long.
I can remember how messy my room would get when I was little. Cleaning it would feel like such an overwhelming task. I would stand in the middle of the chaos and not even know where to start.
I would dissolve into tears of utter despair which could last what felt like hours and still I would have no clue how to take care of it.
I remember my mom oscillating between anger and trying to calm me down and help. Often I think she was just as stumped as I was about how to help me.
Looking back I know myself a little better. I know that as a highly sensitive person the spaces I inhabit are extremely important to me. My home and the space around me reflects my state of being. When I'm stressed it's messier. When I have peace of mind my space is less cluttered.
I can see that as a kid I didn't have healthy ways to express my emotions. The emotional build up was reflective in the build up of clutter in my room. And rather than developing healthy tools to help cope with the problem I was expected to just fix it. Just go in there and make it look good.
Instead of learning a sustainable way to keep my room tidy I became trained at making my room look good every couple weeks.
A the same time I became good at making sure I only exhibited the good looking emotions as well. Hiding the "ugly" ones like anger or sadness or desire and presenting the "nice" ones like happiness, joy or contentment.
Unfortunately, just like with my room, the build up of emotional clutter would eventually explode into a giant mess often in the form of a temper tantrum, a melt down or eventually even mental health breakdowns.
A few years ago I read the book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. I know a lot of people joke about the phenomenon that is this book, but it really impacted me in a good way.
For the first time someone presented me with a simple way to approach clutter and tidiness. You keep what sparks joy and you give every single thing in your house a home.
I first tackled our home Konmari style during our first year of marriage in 2016 and kept doing it in each of our new homes.
While I don't have a perfect home and I still have clutter and objects floating around without a home, I have so much more peace with my living space. I feel like Marie Kondo's book helped me develop the skills to build a peaceful space.
But the interesting thing about her book is that reading it also helped me start learning to process my emotions as well as my stuff. It started slowly. She prompts the reader to visualize your ideal life. This got me thinking about the life I wanted free of stress, full of creativity and surrounded by peaceful beauty.
Over the past few years I have slowly been working on figuring out how to have that life. I realized that I needed to bring a lot of my emotional baggage out of hiding and address each item one-by-one just like with my stuff. In Marie's method you go through an extensive discard phase in which you handle each item and if it fails to spark joy you thank it and discard it.
Reading her book helped me start to look at how much stress and pain my buried emotions were causing me. A couple years ago I started the journey to find professional help working through them. I wanted to do something similar to tidying by handling each of my emotions and addressing them one by one.
I've been seeing a therapist for four months now. I'm working really hard to learn healthier ways of dealing with my feelings and no longer giving them labels like "good" or "ugly" or "bad" but instead holding them gently.
Of course you can't just discard emotions or the baggage that comes with traumatic events, but I am learning how to give them their own space in my home rather than shoving them under my bed or into the closet. And I admit that it is very painful work. But it is work I am so grateful to be doing.
Well. Thanks for reading this and giving me the space to talk about it.
Your Blog Friend,
Lucy🌹
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