Survey #262—Full Response from Gabriella
| Pronouns | She/her |
|---|---|
| Describe a reality check you’ve experienced as you’ve worked to declutter and organize your home—a moment when you realized that your ideas about stuff were at odds with the reality of your life. | - I own enough books to keep me reading until I'm 90. - If I use up all my yarn, I'll end up with a total of over 20 handknit sweaters. - I'm keeping my outdated skinny jeans stashed away in the back of a drawer "just in case", even though I enjoy wearing wide legged pants. - Even though I've been able to strip a big fat peel of my clutter onion year after year, I've still got a long way to go. |
| Please share an “Aha!” moment you’ve experienced as you’ve worked to declutter and organize your home—an inspiration or flash of clarity that made the work easier or less emotionally challenging. | I realized that what essentially supports me in my decluttering process, is to praise myself for whatever I accomplish, instead of seeing it as a failure if things take longer than I had originally planned or expected. For example, in Spring I assumed that decluttering my basement would be fairly straightforward and uncomplicated. During the process I surfaced several boxes of papers and of other objects that I had'nt expected to find, however. Thanks to my mindset of counting everything accomplished as a win and abstaining from thinking in terms of failure, I was able to motivate myself to tackle them one after another without getting discouraged. Even though my basement declutter is taking much longer than I expected, I'm really proud of myself for having been able to substantially reduce a lot of the extra stuff I had found - as well as letting go of many other items that I had originally planned to keep. Whenever I apply reverse decluttering to an area or a "container" that I've thouroughly decluttered before, I am usually able to let go of a lot more. When I feel stuck, seeing myself unable to let go of anything, I can get unstuck by first accepting being stuck and then reflecting in writing on possible first steps. For example, when I felt unable to declutter any more of my remaining 700 books, this method enabled me to come up with a practicable triage algorithm. As a result, I could get rid of another 130 books. What's even more important: I realized that even if I feel severely stuck, I can always get myself unstuck. |
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