When my boyfriend of eighteen years passed away on August 31st I was in rehab. You see, I am in recovery and I am not ashamed to talk about it to my clients. It’s part of who I am and it’s what made me into the business person I am today. But this post is not about recovery or the passing away of people we love.
It’s about learning from our experiences of living with other people with whom we aren’t accustomed to. It’s about finding a balance between two extremes. It’s about learning to love the space we’re in, even when we don’t have total control over our environment.
When Eddie passed away, I was in complete shock. It was totally unexpected as he was only 62 years old.
When I got home from rehab, I was thrown into a chaotic mess. I previously lived in our rental house for two years, which we were in the process of fixing up to either sell or rent out again. The last renter had demolished our house and it needed a lot of TLC. Then, after Eddie’s 90 year old mother passed away in May, he asked me to move in with him and his dad who has dementia to help care for him.
So now, Eddie’s 92 year old father had not only lost his wife, but also his son within three short months, and the house was a disorganized mess. Since Eddie’s mom had been sick for almost a year, the bills were stacked up in piles all over the house, many of them unpaid.
There were boxes and trash and dust.
It was complete chaos.
And to top it all off, dad loves to hoard things he doesn’t need. Like old newspapers and magazines.
So I went on a mission to organize and sort through the mess of it all. Here’s what I learned.
Our house was a cluttered mess until I stepped in to help organize.
According to House Beautiful author Stephanie Waldek, “Organization is everywhere. Even if it isn’t in your own home (yet), we see it on social media, read about it in books, and watch it on Netflix. We are constantly being told by society that organization is the key to a good life, and we eat it right up.
So why are we so obsessed with organizing?
It turns out there’s a lot of psychology at play.
‘Humans are naturally inclined to find comfort in the predictable,’ says Dr. Bethany Cook, a licensed clinical psychologist in Chicago. If something is predictable, it’s safe. And while this is literally true in the animal kingdom (where predictability could mean life or death), it also applies within the context of our homes today, manifesting through the concept of organization. ‘Organizing your living space means you know where things are without searching, and this feels safe,’ says Dr. Cook.
But safety is only the beginning. Perhaps more importantly—at least in contemporary society, when we’re not usually worried about being eaten by a predator—organization gives us a sense of control, not just of our physical space, but of our thoughts and emotions, too.”
So if some people like myself are obsessed with organizing, why are some people obsessed with never throwing anything away? And how on earth can some people live that way? Don’t they want life to be simple? Who wants to spend time looking through clutter just to find a simple bill?
I know when life gets turned upside down, it’s hard to find the energy to keep up with daily obligations. But it has to be done, regardless of how we feel. Life must go on.
Simply going to the store after Eddie died felt like I was carrying 20 pound bags of potatoes over my shoulders. Every aisle in Walmart brought back a memory of us shopping together, cutting up and cracking jokes about how slow the lines were moving or how hard it was to just get out of the store. But, I had to shop for food, or else how were we going to eat?
So, I summoned the energy for the task at hand and I forged ahead. And, as time went on, things got easier. So I got to work finding all the bills lying around the house and started organizing them into piles by type. I found bills going all the way back to 2002!
Why?! I asked myself. Why on earth would anyone keep bills this old? And how did they ever find anything? I may never know the answer to that question, but I did some research on they psychology of hoarding and it turns out that people hoard for the same reason people organize - to feel safe.
