Last night I woke up with a start at 2am. My large dog, Keats, had barked and I got out of bed to investigate. After shuffling around in flip flops and a long tee shirt, I managed to get Keats back inside. He was panting and wiped a thick layer of drool on my bare leg. The husky, who seemed to have some animal trapped behind the tool shed, ignored my attempts to get her in the house.
When I got back to bed, I figured my rapid heartbeat, one of my symptoms of anxiety, would keep me awake since it usually does. I also have the house to myself for a very rare 30 hours or so, because Coraline ended up spending the whole weekend with the neighbor and my husband and teenage daughter flew to Denver for a concert. A completely empty house for a night is rare enough that a random bark from a dog would be reason for my body to be on alert, but I surprisingly fell back asleep and didn’t fully wake up again until daylight, which is so unexpected I guess I have to write about it here.
My childhood home was extremely absent of things like clutter and dust. Starting at about age ten, I was not allowed to spend the night at a friend’s house on Fridays because my entire family spent Saturday morning deep cleaning the house. My job was the bathrooms. Mom stayed in her robe and wouldn’t shower and get dressed until the early afternoon, a signal that we were done I could go outside and play. Evenings in our house ended with the sounds of a running dishwasher after Mom had vacuumed, fluffed the throw pillows, and Dad wiped down all the kitchen counters. The light over the sink stayed on, casting this warm glow that illuminated a scene of everything being exactly in the place it was supposed to be. As a child this brought comfort, and it’s something I have done as an adult.
There’s a scene in Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential where he’s training a prep cook and he uses a clean bleach rag to wipe their messy station. He shoves the now soiled rag in the new hire’s face and yells “This is what your mind looks like!” As a person who needs creative spaces to work, I can’t think of a better way to explain what it’s like for me to live in a house that’s full of clutter.
For the last four years since I bought this house, I have fought a losing battle of things piled up in crawl spaces and cabinets and drawers and closets. I couldn’t keep up on the dusting and wiping the walls and mopping the floors. My family didn’t see the house this way, but everywhere I looked, I saw work that needed to be done. I felt it through the doors that hid shelves in a hallway closet. I slept over a crawl space full of old paint cans, random bedding, and Christmas decorations. The garage would get so cluttered that I would force my husband to watch episodes of “Hoarders” to hopefully get him to better understand what I saw when I looked at it. It was difficult to explain why it gave me anxiety. Not just the low-grade kind, it’s the all encompassing feeling of being paralyzed and thrown into a lake. I couldn’t spend more than 30 seconds in the garage most of the time. Sometimes I couldn’t go down the stairs and walk past the door.
About a year ago, a profile about me was published that involved hours of interviews. I agreed to do a FaceTime tour of my house. At one point toward the end of that call, I paused on the scene of the living room upstairs and heard myself say something along the lines of “This house is the thing I am most proud of. It’s the thing I can actually point to and visibly see the results of all the work I’ve done. I don’t think it’ll ever be perfect.”
I didn’t go on to explain, or maybe I did and I don’t remember, since my brain shuts down and stops recording things I say to the general public. I think that’s why it’s so odd I remember saying that. But for the last year I have found myself wondering what I meant by “perfect.”
This summer, in the five weeks I had off from public speaking, I agreed to do some huge projects with big, looming deadlines. Then the dog we’d had since Coraline was eight months old died suddenly and I couldn’t function for two weeks from the grief. My schedule this fall is pretty brutal, too, which is paralyzing in its own way, since I never know how my mental and physical health will handle all of that. Every day started to begin in the darkness of 4am with an unwelcome but familiar panic attack. I know from experience that starting a speaking gig season this way does not end well, and I would be a crumpled, sobbing heap by Thanksgiving.
It took the purchase of a large tool bench, one of those racks to store storage bins, and a lot of begging and pleading, but after six months my husband finally got the garage organized enough for me to be able to go in there and clean the space and make it useable. Next I tackled the laundry room, then the crawl space, and the pantry under the stairs. As I created spaces to store things, the clutter almost completely vanished, but I was running out of time to wipe the dust and grime. For the first time ever, I hired a cleaning company to do a complete deep clean of the whole house and tipped all five of them fifty bucks each. When I got home after they were done, I saw my house through a cleaner’s eyes and the clutter that I felt I had missed. I got rid of houseplants I didn’t really like but still managed to care for and deep cleaned shelves. I took framed photos down, patched the holes from the nails in the walls, and wiped down entire hallways. I heavily debated painting my bathroom a pumpkin color while I reorganized its small closet. All of this took about three weeks of near-constant work, and of course no one in my family had much to say about it. But it mattered to me. It mattered a fuck ton.
Last week I had one of those mornings where you get up before everyone and are able to make some coffee quietly enough to not wake anyone else up. I sat on my couch and didn’t see any work that needed to be done. I could breathe. I opened my laptop and wrote in a journal I started at the beginning of August in an attempt to clear out mental clutter. The sense of peace was beautiful.
I know that peace is how I was able to fall back to sleep almost immediately last night. Usually my mind starts cataloging all the house projects I still need to do and everything I want to get cleaned and organized before I start traveling for work a lot. Things I have put off for years. But none of that was there anymore. All I had to do was take a deep breath and relish the feeling of sinking into my bed and falling asleep. Maybe it’s because I finally have a house that feels perfect.
Until next time.
xo,
-step.
Speaking as a fellow introvert, writer, and un-clutterer, I feel you. You did a great job! PS: My "un-cluttering name" is Ruth-less. Haha!
That is beautiful. Now, allow yourself, periodically, to pay someone to clean it so you'll feel inspired to declutter & perfect it again, because clutter happens. No idea what the interval should be but often enough to be at peace - & to keep decluttering time short.
I just loved this piece.