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The Insatiable Need to Declutter is Overwhelming

August 29, 2011 by

What’s this? Two posts in less than a month? You have GOT to be joking. Something must be amiss…

To tell the truth, I’m sitting here wondering what on earth to do with myself because I’ve managed to yet again contract a cold, and I’m being utterly useless. I’ve done nothing but lay in bed half the day whilst getting gradually more worked up because if there’s one thing that grinds my gears (in the words of Peter Griffin), it’s feeling so crap that you can’t do anything, but being mentally alert enough to know that there is so much that needs doing, and the longer you don’t do it, the more the rubbish jobs mount up whilst you idle your hours away sprawled out willing yourself to get back to normal. Whatever normal is.

There is so much to do, and lately I feel like I have adopted my Dad’s inability to not doing anything for more than 10 minutes. Seriously – it seems these days that as soon as I wake, my brain is doing a breakdown of all the tasks I’ve assigned it, and it’s assessing the likelihood of whether I’m likely to achieve my set tasks based on:

  • a) how well I feel/any impending illnesses
  • b) is my back behaving itself today
  • c) did I get enough sleep last night to enable satisfactory brain function levels  (I can never get enough)
  • d) what deadlines have I got looming on the horizon and how many hours do I need to dedicate to certain work-related writing tasks
  • e) who needs what from me today
  • f) how motived do I feel
  • g) my levels of crankiness and whether my stress-head will make everything seem one hundred times harder than it actually is.
Ultimately I always set myself too many tasks, and as a result, there’s a list of uncompleted To Do‘s that amass over days, weeks and months.
I’m waiting for my much-cherised week off work (well, all in all, 10 days) – that’s 10 days without deadlines, with no pending work and no work-related responsibilities. 10 days where I can get things done and maybe disappear camping for a couple of nights, too.
But it’s so hard to shake off the itchy-twitchies, the insatiable need to just rid my life of all this physical clutter that’s crept up on us as a result of a house in desperate need of renovation, a million jobs started and half finished because of some issue or another. And it’s so hard to shake off the itchy-twitchies simply because I’m literally lying here in bed mentally counting down what I want to get done during my 10 days of ‘freedom’, and I wanted to have started on them yesterday.
I am the first to admit that they are completely inane things, like clearing the downstairs table of all my crap, getting my filing finished, decluttering the house, painting the windows, clearing the fallen apples away from the apple tree so we can mow, pulling down the old trellis so we can grass the Mediterranean area (more info later), mending the bathroom taps… but getting them done and out of the way will make me feel so much lighter. Like I live like a normal person, in a normal house where you don’t have to turn the door handle in a certain way so it doesn’t fall off. Or every time you make your way to the kitchen you don’t have to weave your way around the teetering boxes in the dining room that are just full of stuff that you swear you’ve been through a million times, and still there’s just SO MUCH STUFF EVERYWHERE. Or vacuum around the pile of wood that’s been on the landing for about 5 years because you didn’t finish boxing in the pipes in the bathroom. That kind of thing.
Yes it’s getting the completely stupid, small insignificant things that I want to just get done, that will mean I feel as though there aren’t as many issues grating on me. So that I can feel like I can get on with other things, bigger, more important projects that mean I don’t have to contend with that mental list of a million silly To-Do’s hanging over my head… and so my life is somehow just less cluttered with stuff. Rubbish. Bits and bobs that get in the way.
SO MUCH TO DO. SO MUCH TO DECLUTTER. AND BEING ILL IS SO BORING.
<End Rambling Ill-Person Transmission>

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Comments

  1. Maria says
    August 29, 2011 at 8:04 pm

    hang on in there! I can totally sympathise with being frustrated at being ill – I am exactly the same, I always get really wound up about all the things I *want* to be doing, and how it can’t possibly be normal to be ill for this long etc etc… interestingly I recently realised that my mum is exactly the same – we were talking on the phone and she was complaining of not being able to do all the things she wanted to do, and I had to stop her in her tracks and say ‘ if it was me, you’d tell me to relax and take it easy, right?’. SO much easier to tell someone else than to take your own advice, I know.

    I can also relate on the house front – do not despair! even though we have made massive progress in the past 3 years, you will always have to turn our bathroom knob the wrong way around because it was fitted upside down and can’t be changed because the door won’t take it the right way around now, and I have had piles of floorboards in the hallway for months while we got around to removing old, broken floorboards, and replace the new ones. Cannot tell you how happy we were when we put in carpet after walking on bare floorboards for a month!

    So basically, from someone who doesn’t have a blog but who has your blog on my blog reader, my sympathy, and all I can recommend is patience and good humour. hope you feel better soon!

  2. clare says
    August 29, 2011 at 9:21 pm

    ugh, goin through the same thing. you have my sympathies, get well soon.

  3. Sue says
    August 30, 2011 at 6:58 am

    I was in exactly the same situation a couple of months back. While I was ill I made lists on paper (just to get them out of my head). Lists of big jobs and lists of little jobs. Then I highlighted the jobs on each list that annoyed me most and aimed to get rid of them first. As soon as I was well enough I started on the lists, not doing everything at once but breaking things down into managable chunks.

    Even a spare 10 minutes would be spent weeding the raised beds that annoyed me so much, eventually in the space of a few days I saw progress on the lists and this spurred me on to attack more jobs. I’m still not completely there, but my head is lighter and I have more ticks on my lists than ever before.

    Sometimes you build jobs up in your head to a greater level than they actually are and sometimes you just have to accept that some jobs won’t get done and relax!!

    I hope you can find time on your 10 day break to have some fun as well as attacking your tasks.

    Sue xx

  4. Steel says
    September 4, 2011 at 8:33 am

    My house is exactly like yours.

    I’ve been weaving my way around the piles of stuff in the corridors and lobby (and entrances to rooms and in corners of the bathroom and down the side of bed etc) for years now, so I know exactly how you feel. I also know that will contributing to your illness because it is turning your brain into a stressy pretzel shape, and stress chemicals flying around your body are exhausting.

    In fact recently I did lose the plot somewhat after writing a huge list of stuff that I believed needed to be done, and ended up taking to my bed overwhelmed. By the time we had sifted through the list though and worked out what was urgent/important, not urgent but important etc we had a very manageable list and it put things into perspective. Some of what I thought was important wasn’t at all, some was important but I was prioritizing above urgent stuff that needed attending to because I was procrastinating.

    To be honest, we have literally taken the stuff from the hallways etc and stored it all out of sight in a spare room. I’ve been guilty of not doing things until I can do them perfectly. That just doesn’t work and the stuff just sits there making you feel like crap.

    So now I’ve called time on a lot of things for now. Drawn a line in the sand and said “No. I will not be getting to that project any time soon and it isn’t urgent so into the spare room you must go.” Then I shut the door. The projects are still on my list but I will get to them in the proper time. It’s lifted a massive weight off me.

    Take care Lucy, get well soon and don’t do too much on your 10 days off!

  5. Louise Pen y Graig says
    September 27, 2011 at 3:03 pm

    Just read this today and it mirrors exactly what I’m feeling right now! I’m lying down reading blogs and not feeling up to anything. My husband’s away until next week and I have a list of things I want to achieve before he comes back. I’ve been wondering why I always think I’ll get round to doing the things I don’t get round to when he’s here, on top of looking after the chickens and geese, taking the dog for a walk, washing up, brining firewood in and all the other myriad thing he normally does! Is it possible to have a ‘normal house’ and a smallholding? I’ve decided that to do this would probably mean being obsessive-compulsive!