SOON, issue 21: A Discussion of Clutter in Three Vignettes
No solutions, no advice, just thoughts.
Welcome to Something Out of Nothing, a newsletter about meaning—making it, finding it, offering it. I talk about the writing life, teaching, thrifting, books, travel, obsessions and idle interests, and much more.
Stacks and Piles
Around this time last year, my husband and I hosted a yard sale that doubled as a fundraiser for our adoption journey (the journey is on-going). Beforehand, we sought donated items from friends, neighbors, and the larger community. The response was heartening and overwhelming. Our home, garage, front and back porches—over six weeks, we amassed and stored several households worth of used goods. This is one of the ways people fundraise for the adoption process, which costs an average of $40-70k.
On the weekend of the yard sale, we got up at 4AM and started unloading onto the driveway and across the front yard. Three hours later, we were still unloading. People swarmed the sale, we raised a few thousand dollars, but at no point on Saturday or Sunday did we actually stop unloading the house of collected stuff. I’d go inside for a glass of water and sit dazed at the kitchen table, taking a breather, when I’d suddenly realize I was staring directly at another garbage bag full of clothes, or another box shoved in the corner. I’d run upstairs to use the bathroom and pause in the door of the guest bedroom, only half-unloaded then apparently forgotten about in the early morning rush of serious yard sale folks. Finding so many places to store so much stuff had created a blindness to the piecemeal quantity of it throughout our home.
During those weeks before the sale, as our home and daily lives gasped under the weight of all we were taking in, I worried about the optics of a house so bursting at the seams. My husband worried. I’m sure my stepsons wondered what the hell was going on (we explained, of course, but it didn’t lessen the amazement). I felt judged. I don’t know that I was judged, but I felt it. By whom? By everyone, including myself. I was willing to put my focus and energy entirely into this yard sale fundraiser because underneath all this effort was the adoption. The next phase of our family life, our marriage, our desired future.
But truthfully, I’ve always been a person who creates piles. Stacks. All of the places I’ve called home, no matter how generally clean and organized: papers and books on the desk, too many books on the bedside table, too many shoes in the corner near the door, even more books stacked in front of the over-stuffed bookshelves, clothes swept over the chair next to the closet, odd little items recently thrifted and temporarily placed on a ledge or the floor.
I often collect items without imagining where things might go in my home, and I’ve always been partial to nostalgic ephemera (random notes and letters, loose photos, notebooks, journals, magazines). I am a person who lets literal things linger, on the periphery, for months, even years.
But after the yard sale, with the house finally emptied and returned to itself, I was surprised at the new sensitivity I felt toward my belongings, my habits with piles around the house, and just how much I’d amassed over the last five years of marriage in a suburban household. I saw my tendencies more clearly. I felt tired of the busy-ness and business of creating space for things. But rather than decide that I must change something about myself, I felt tender and curious. I still feel tender and curious.
The Cluttered Mind is Processing
People say a cluttered home is evidence of a cluttered mind. But what of maximalism as a design preference?
What of devotion to the beauty of special objects? What of collections that expand over a lifetime?
What of the many hobbies and interests and necessities that do not live in a digital (and therefore easily hidden) space?
What of our whims—the subjectivity of joy, fascination, awe?
What of the necessary mess of allowing ourselves to experiment and give up on things?
I don’t want to build model planes anymore, you might say.
Or run marathons.
Or garden.
Or scrapbook.
Or be with you.
Or be that person.
Or or or.
My point is, what mind isn’t cluttered? As it swerves and sinks into the deeply human practice of searching for something more or as-yet-unknown?
Sometimes literal mess is a physical manifestation of processing needs, wants, desires, hopes. I want to allow myself the grace of accepting the process of my messy mind. I want it to be okay that sometimes my mind is spilling outward.
What of extremity, some will say? What of a home layered in mess that a mind cannot process? What of hoarding?
That is not what I’m talking about. That is not the type of cluttered mind to which I speak right now. That is, in fact, the type of cluttered mind that aligns with the essence of the maxim a cluttered home is evidence of a cluttered mind.
Sometimes I see another person’s gleaming floors, corner to corner of a room, and my face furrows in want of what another person seems to have: cleanliness as minimalism as clarity as ease as discipline as achieving some greater echelon of truth I don’t yet know in my own life.
Then again, sometimes I see another person’s clean floors and I wonder: what are you hiding and where are you hiding it? (Because we all are.)
Sometimes I see another person’s clean floors and I wonder: who are you when you’re alone?
Sometimes I see another person’s clean floors and I wonder: what motivates you? Have you never felt meaninglessness? (Or is that what the gleaming floors are about?)
I tidy the center of rooms, rarely the corners. Every home is a series of desire paths anyway.
Autobiography via Objects
My roughed-up, brick-red, Fjallraven Kanken brand. This backpack was gifted to me with a lot of wear already, but I’ve certainly added to the patina with the way I stuff it full and haul it to and from my classes, my office, coffee shops, and on every trip I take. I thrifted a beautiful, stain-free, canvas backpack as a possible upgrade, but in some mysterious way, hauling my life in it took even more effort, so back to my dirty Fjallraven Kanken I went.
My bright red clogs. I go long stretches believing these red clogs are too loud and conspicuous, clownish and absurd. Then I wear them once and realize how wrong I was, and I live in them for weeks on end.
My towering collection of Granta. This literary magazine is a well-regarded, decades-old British institution. I’ve even thrifted a few copies from the 70s and 80s, but rarely do I ever get a chance to read a single issue cover to cover. Still, I keep them all. I imagine creating a class one day themed around reading the archives.
My earrings. Largely thrifted, of course, this is only a fraction of the selection in my jewelry box. While my wardrobe has gotten quieter the past several years (apart from my clogs), my personal style has narrowed in on my choice of earrings and my glasses. Speaking of…
My life-long collection of glasses. Since the second grade, when I sat in the front row yet still could not see the whiteboard. My first pair were pink wire frames with a tiny fake-diamond-encrusted butterfly perched on one side (not pictured). The summer before eighth grade, I finally got contacts, but my early twenties brought me back to the ease of slipping on a pair of glasses. About every two years, I get the itch for a new pair, and it feels like slipping on a slightly altered persona each time. When I look at old photos of myself, the glasses I’m wearing evoke my stage of life as much as my clothing or makeup choices or the people I’m surrounded by. I hold onto my old glasses in the same way I keep my old notebooks or journals—to whom would these old things make sense, if not me? (Latest ones are the top right.)
My favorite novel, Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. Discovered in a thrift store when I was eighteen, and I assumed the titular ‘geek’ would be a nerd and not a live-animal-eating carnival entertainer—a thing I knew nothing about until the moment I read the first page in this matter-of-factly wild and heartfelt drama about a family of self-made “freaks” running a traveling sideshow. Geek Love is a stunner, on the line level, on the plot level, on the heart level. The newer copies are hyper-colored, but these older copies I’ve collected are my preference. I don’t know what I’m doing with this collection. When I think of giving one away, I can’t bear it. When I cross paths with another copy (it’s rare), I have to buy it.
The wedding-day painting. Gifted by family, this painting is inspired by my favorite wedding-day photo with my husband: the two of us sitting on the edge of the bed in my apartment, all dolled up, waiting to leave for the ceremony. The photo was taken by one of my stepsons, while his three brothers sat in the other room, also dolled up, and scrolling. I had this painting hanging in our bedroom but I recently moved it down to the office, now one of the first things to catch my eye when I come home.
This sideboard covered in family photos. My most domestic design decision, inspired by the way my mother did the same thing in my childhood home.
*Richmond folks*: I have three spots left in my group read-through of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, starting this Monday, June 9! An evening class that’ll hop-scotch across most of the summer, we’ll be setting & pursuing goals, exploring the guidance of several authors (not just Julia Cameron), communing and writing and attempting new ways of showing up for each other in creative practice.
It’s a wonderful boost when you forward SOON to the people in your life who might connect with it. Share button below <3.