Uncluttering is not a competition
Posted in: UncategorizedJanine Adams, owner of Peace of Mind Organizing in St. Louis, in her guest post today reminds all of us that we should make things as simple as we need things to be instead of uncluttering to impress others. When she’s not helping clients in person, she presents the electronic course Declutter Happy Hour. Welcome, Janine!
I had a dozen professional organizers come to my house for a social gathering recently. I’m a professional organizer myself, so that probably doesn’t sound like such a big deal. But it was.
I came to the organizing field by way of being a messy person who yearned to find organizing systems that work for me. I have huge empathy for my clients, which they love. I’m open about not being “born organized.” But there was something about a dozen organizers, whose homes in my imagination are beautifully organized (I’ve seen some of them and they are!) that made me quake in my boots. I’m president of the St. Louis chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers, so I felt like I had to live up to some unstated standard of organizational perfection.
As I looked around my 101-year-old house, envisioning what the organizers would see, all sorts of oddities that had been invisible to me for awhile jumped out. Like the heavy oak door that had fallen off its hinges, so it’s resting on its side in the dining room. Like the cluttered sun porch that really serves as a storage space. Like the dead TV in the dining room that’s waiting to be taken to the recycling place. Like the kitchen, last renovated in the 80s, that any normal middle-income couple would have renovated (probably more than once) in the 17 years we’ve owned the home.
I thought about trying to whip the place into a more presentable shape before the party (though I knew there was nothing I could do about the kitchen). I did tidy and clean, and the house looked as good as it ever does. But I decided to let go of this notion that I should present my home as some sort of paragon of organization. I decided to leave the heavy things in place, to just take out the recycling that had gathered in the sun porch and leave everything else there. I let go of worrying about someone opening the bathroom closet and seeing that it’s been on my decluttering to-do list for ages. I didn’t even make the bed–I just made our messy bedroom off limits.
And you know what? It was all good. Folks complimented the beauty of our old home (its wood trim and stained glass windows really are lovely). No one even looked out the kitchen window to the sun porch. They were all focused on one another, on chatting and having fun. Oh, and on the delicious cake my pastry-chef husband made.
This is a great lesson for me. I now know I can invite people into my home even if it doesn’t look perfect. I don’t have to be who I think people want me to be just because of my profession or my standing within it. I just need to be me. I’m comfortable with having a door on its side against the wall in my dining room, and everyone else seemed to be as well. Who knows, maybe my less-than-perfect home made some of those organizers feel better about theirs.
