Physician, Organize Thyself
April 30th, 2007Last night I got word from Sarah-Architect that she was organizing her closet. Naturally, I donned my Organizer-Superhero cape and flew over there. Seven hours later, we had …
- three bags of garbage
- a box and a large bag of stuff for Goodwill
- two additional large bags for Jeremy Sr. to look through and consider parting with
- a box of things to be donated to my vet’s office (towels)
- two hopeful bags for Buffalo Exchange
- some potential phones for donating
- one very organized, dusted, cleaned closet
This was amazingly fun work. I love a good organization project. Labels, containers, color-coding = yum. I can remember as a little girl visiting my grandparents’ house and being “allowed” to organize a drawer for my grandmother (just one at a time). I would take out everything and put it back in neatly. In the process, forgotten belongings—photos, letters, bargains found in discount stores and stashed for later use—were found, and unwanted treasures were mine for the taking. Every drawer held moments of discovery, memory, and story telling (the story so often beginning, “Oh, that was a BARGAIN!”). Best of all was the feeling of accomplishment once the drawer had been pared down and tidied. It was useful in a new way. I’m thankful that my grandma didn’t find this too weird a characteristic in a grandchild, because I enjoyed it immensely (thanks, Gram!).
But the enjoyment is only one of three sides of my organizational bent. The second side is my anxiety, which I have pretty well under control these days, but which is soothed by cleaning and reorganizing things. I’m not neurotic for things to constantly BE organized, but I do find comfort in emptying something—anything, a closet, a drawer, a ROOM—and setting it up anew in a more efficient way. I even love to move furniture around into new configurations, and I like to make something messy into something clean. I worked one summer as a maid for a cleaning service, and it was the perfect summer job in many ways.
The third aspect of this is my tendency to make giant messes. I drag things out, pile them up, USE them. Part of having a system to my belongings is knowing what “stuff” I actually own, and wanting to make use of it. Waste not this box of colored pencils, this plastic container of nails and screws.
I forgot a fourth aspect: What Stevel calls “high turnover.” I do like to shop, and shopping introduces new items into the household. Places must be found for them. Space must be made, items they can replace, gotten rid of.
So, there are my impressively labeled storage boxes of computer accessories, and my color-ordered, hanging shirts. My binders with labeled tabs for teaching materials, notes from grad school, homeowners association papers. My lovely photo albums, my neatly stacked towels—one stack for beach towels, one for bath towels, one for cat-bathing towels—and the decorative red boxes labeled and organized to contain Stevel’s impressive collection of video games from boyhood on. But there are these un-glamorous sides to my organization as well. It’s just not as beneficial as it may seem on the surface to live with an Organizer Superhero such as myself. Often—so very often—Stevel comes home to find a room completely torn apart. The place is a disaster, with my insistence that it’s “temporary” indicating they may be this way for days. There are items in the doorway (his pet peeve), shopping bags of new things in view. His belongings are everywhere, destined, he knows, for new locations where he will have trouble finding them for a while without my help. And in many cases, I’m anxious—committed to continuing without stopping to spend time with him or do anything else. In a word, obsessed. Often, there’s something major due very soon, and the project seems like pure procrastination. He’s become very understanding (resigned?) about this aspect of my personality, and I appreciate him for it.
I have to wonder what it would be like if I didn’t have such a “thing” for organizing. If instead I had a thing for just putting things away where they belong all the time, rather than having this constant thought that the messier I make things, the more interesting they will be to straighten out once the mess gets, not “too big,” but big ENOUGH. To be worth it. Why keep my students’ hand-ins in order during and after class, when if I just shove paper after paper into my bag, I can go home and luxuriate all by myself in the making of piles? Why hang up that skirt, when, by Friday, I can have a jumble of clothing on the chair to delve into? Oh, God. Help.