Hi everyone, happy Friday! Sorry to be late with this. Ironically this week’s newsletter is about feeling overwhelmed and behind on things. The topic had already been chosen before I realized I was going to miss my deadline but seems even more appropriate now. Hope everyone has a nice weekend and if anyone else is raging about their laundry right now, read this and know you are not alone….
For the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling a bit disappointed in myself because certain places in the house that I’d considered decluttered and tidied up have recently slowly started to become RE-cluttered and DE-tidied. In addition to feeling disappointed, I’ve also been a bit confused as to how this had happened seemingly so quickly and easily, and frustrated because I felt like this should NOT be happening. I was surprised to see our dining room table start to have piles of papers on it again, and a couple of items had been placed (by me) on the staircase in the entryway, unmoved for several days. Ahhh!! Not the precious entryway I’d JUST written about two months ago as one of my greatest conquests. How was this happening??
After giving it some more thought over the last few days though (and also listening to some very timely podcasts) I’ve had a bit of a mental reset and also some acceptance and clarity. Despite knowing that the key to success is consistency and focusing on routines rather than concentrating only on outcomes, I fell into the trap of expecting a “quick fix” in terms of keeping up with my house and was becoming a bit too complacent. I think because the changes I have made so far have significantly decreased the amount of time I need to clean and finally made it so I don’t have to worry about mess all the time, I became a bit too overconfident about how much maintenance will still always be required no matter what.
Just because I got all of the artwork under control at one point doesn’t mean my daughter suddenly stopped drawing 20 new pictures a day. And cleaning up and reorganizing the entryway didn’t stop us from bringing new items into the house that need to find a new home. Add on top of that add on a couple of extra busy weeks that made keeping up with things in general more difficult than usual, and it should actually be no surprise at all that the house was getting a bit messier.
My first piece of re-inspiration came from listening to one of my favorite podcasts called American Glutton. Actor Ethan Suplee is the host; most well-known (to me at least) for his role on Boy Meets World, also My Name is Earl. At Ethan’s highest weight he was about 550 pounds, but he has since lost about 300 pounds and for the past seven years or so (I believe) has maintained a healthy diet and lifestyle.
His podcast focuses on nutrition and health and it’s one of my favorites. This week he was talking with his guest about the hard work of maintaining weight loss and how so many people have difficulties with maintenance because once they lose weight they want to go back to eating whatever they want to. I realized this was mirroring my attitude towards my house. I was forgetting that maintenance doesn’t equal easy. Just because I have a BIT less clutter and piles, doesn’t mean that I can go back to my old routines and expect the house to stay clutter free. It has to be something I make the choice to do, every day, the same as eating healthy (which I’m also working on…we’ll deal with that another day).
The next day, I was listening to one of the latest Clutterbug Podcasts and she had a new guest on, Stephanie, who refers to herself as the “Secret Slob” (I love this of course, and plan to look up all of her materials now…I’ll let you all know what I find). She said something that was so simple yet in that moment for me was so profound and eye opening, I have to pass it along. She was joking about how her husband said to her “why do you always say you’re trying to ‘catch up’ on the laundry, you’re never going to be caught up on the laundry, it’s never done”. I laughed at first when she said this, but then I stopped and thought about it for a second and it hit me…holy crap, he’s right, it’s never going to be done!
At first, this thought sounds incredibly depressing, but I’ve decided to try to think about it in a new way, and I’m hoping it can eventually become something liberating instead. It hit me as I thought about the concept of never being caught up on laundry, and I thought to myself, I have never once said “I’m caught up on dinner” or “I’m caught up on the grocery shopping”. I’ve also never become resentful of the fact that we need to eat breakfast every day or that the plants need to be watered on a regular basis, those things have just always been something that I view as continuous and ongoing, but for some reason when I see the laundry basket that I just emptied two days ago become full all over again, it can easily fill me with rage and resentment. I really can’t explain why this is, except for to think that I’ve foolishly been trying to “catch up” on it for years and think I have been chasing a feeling of being “done with” or “on top of” the laundry.
I’m going to attempt to change my mind set about this and see if it helps at all. I’d love to report to you all that this eye-opening epiphany completely changed things for me already and that my resentment of the laundry magically disappeared, but I literally just walked by the laundry basket five minutes ago and felt the familiar rage bubbling up. So…not quite a success yet. But I’m going to try something new this week and I’ll see how it goes. Typically, I don’t do laundry every day because with the three of us it isn’t really necessary; however, I have a bad habit of then waiting too long and usually end up having to do tons all at once, which leads to the trouble because I then run out of time and energy to actually put all the clothes away when it piles up to four or five loads all at once.
So, this week I am going to do laundry every night. Even if it is a tiny amount, I’m just going to wash whatever we have and immediately put it away the second it gets out of the dryer. I’m going to try to train my brain into viewing laundry the same as eating dinner; it’s just something that has to get done every day. I am also going to work on retraining my brain to remember that all of the tidying and decluttering is part of a daily routine and is also never done. If you think of it as parts of a routine, rather than something to try to “finish” or “accomplish” it should become less overwhelming and more just part of life (that’s what I’m telling myself anyway…we’ll see)
I’ll let you all know how this new laundry plan goes next week. Cross your fingers for me!!