Structure and direction

When your brain is dealing with things like depression, anxiety, ADD, and OCD, it needs a lot of structure and direction.  I'm pretty sure this is why I excelled in the Navy and fail miserably at home.  My brain is usually all over the place, lost for where to start or where to go to next.  Clutter and chaos is the name of the game.  And I gotta tell ya, I hate it.  It drives my anxiety up and my lows even lower.  I know I'll never live a minimalist life (although I think it would be ideal) but I think I have finally found at least the direction I need in a blog I stumbled across a couple of weeks ago.  Slow Your Home is a blog about simplifying your life.  It's about everything from decluttering to knowing you're enough.  Brooke McAlary keeps it simple.  I need simple.  Anyway, from her blog I learned she had a Facebook group for an annual decluttering challenge so I ran right over to join up.  It's exactly what I needed.  Someone to break it down, give me lists, tell me where to go next.  The members share their challenges and triumphs and are incredibly encouraging to one another.  

Baby steps.  Baby steps are good.  I have a bad habit of diving into things headfirst with enough gusto for 10 people then burning out and giving up.  I started with the January challenges even though it was June because it's always best to begin at the beginning.  

The first thing on the list was kitchen drawers and boy, were mine a mess.  We had the ever present junk drawer (although 2 or 3 of them could have qualified for the title) and one we thought it was funny to call the danger drawer.  I did not count the number of items removed but it was A LOT.

Guess which one is the danger drawer?

I'm discovering that slow and steady not only wins the race, it helps real change occur and stick, so I spread the process out and only did a couple of drawers a day.

I found this cool, in drawer knife block at Target.  It is no longer called the danger drawer.

 

 And this is no longer a junk drawer.

This is so crazy to me.  I have never lived in a house without a junk drawer.  I proudly showed my husband and he joked, "Well, it's kinda useless as a junk drawer now."  I punched him in the arm, he laughed and told me it was awesome and good job.  Sadly, my psyche and ego need lots of atta-boys.  It's been almost a week and I still open it occasionally just to look at it.  I spied the tray out in the mess in the garage and put it to use.  I have a small box of things that I removed and will give a permanent home to once the garage gets done (I finally have hope that some day it will actually be a functioning garage).  I plan on adding divider trays to the utensil drawers once I decide on and find the ones I want to use.

The next thing on the January challenge list was medicine cabinets.  This was an easy one and only took about 15 minutes.  I removed 27 items to the trash can.  The next day I pulled out 2 bottles of perfume and 2 of cologne that I can't remember not being in our medicine cabinets.  Not sure why I've resisted throwing them out for years except that they weren't cheap to begin with and it seemed a waste.  Which is a really dumb mindset considering they were just going to waste while taking up space.  If I had found them a new home while they still smelled good, they wouldn't have gone to waste.

 

 

Please note that there is a proper way to dispose of medications.  I purchased postage-paid envelopes to send them to a place that handles them at Walgreens for around $3.

Today I will clean out my purse and my car and since I don't have an entry way, January's challenges will have been met.  The next set will be a little tougher as they include the bathrooms, the laundry room, and the utility closet.

Remember, slow and steady is the way to not giving up and real change.