It started with a whisper.

I keep not writing.

I don’t know why.

The thought of stopping, and simultaneously *doing* don’t sound appealing. I’ve been doing a lot recently. And when I stop, I just want to read and/or check out. But writing has not been high on my list. It hasn’t been anywhere on my list.

I did consider multiple times today and a couple yesterday that I should write. But it felt like anything I wanted to say would start in the middle, and the thought of that annoyed me.

The middle is that I’ve been struggling with food lately and food has been a struggle and that today I was choosing not to use it as a crutch or to numb or to comfort.

The beginning is that over a week ago, I tweaked something somewhere in my back and the spasms at my ribs, in my back on the right side have been so violent and overwhelming that my kids can announce “spasms” when I involuntarily gasp from across the house.

Which makes me smile, amidst the paralyzing oww.

But yeah, so this pain has been bad. A pain that ibuprofen couldn’t even take the edge off of. It’s made cleaning and being productive hard. It’s made sitting and chilling hard. It’s made being okay with me very challenging. It made being challenging.

I am almost always in an ebbing and flowing state of pain and/or discomfort physically. That part is not new for me. But this spasming was something different. It was something so completely overwhelming. I felt like I could never get ahead of the pain long enough to overcome the mental and emotional weight of navigating being alive.

And as such, my body tried to revert back to a default comfort. For a few days, I stopped being mindful of my body and I ate when I wasn’t hungry. I used food to numb and avoid and fill an insatiable part of my brain. The part of my brain that is certain that, with enough food, I will be able to generate enough comfort to override the physical pain.

This, at best, is an illusion. And at worst, a complete lie.

Eventually my lack of mindfulness turned into my version of “fuck it”. So I got potato chips and disregarded my body’s inability to process canola oil. And I got ice cream, which my body probably would have been fine with (free of allergens), but under the circumstances, my brain was not. And I indulged for a couple moments.

I don’t feel guilty for eating the food. I didn’t self-loathe or beat myself up. It didn’t change my worth. What it did, was put me at a risk for making the pain worse. Which, when you stop to consider is completely asinine.

So Tuesday night, I gave the culprits to Chris to take to work for himself. And Wednesday morning I dumped the ice cream. And then Chris called me enlightened. And I had to chuckle for a moment because prospective is funny.

I’m still in pain, but it’s not the crawl in a hole and die pain. Or maybe it is and I’ve just grown accustom to it. But I’ve leaned back into my regular eat when I’m (actually) hungry routine and despite the pain, I’ve been purging the basement again and making notable progress. I have three different loads of donations ready to go in the garage, the kids are almost out of school for winter break, Christmas everything has been taken care of and life carries on.

Light up your wildest dreams.

It crossed my mind last week that we’re coming up on December, and I want to wrap up this year the way I began it. So I’ve been going back through all the places I decluttered early on and redecluttering. (Hey, look, I made up a new word!) It’s interesting to see how I’ve changed in my purging. I’m not attached the way I used to be. And I’m not so caught up in the permanence of it. I just enjoy things not being everywhere. And throughout the year I’ve often lightly purged and organized, but this past week there has been an urgency to it. To be rid of the things that weigh me and my family down.

I did my dresser top, my closet floor, linen closet, (almost) all the kitchen cabinets, and the pantry. I cut L’s toys by half (for a potential rotation) and brought all his huge toys to the garage. I emptied my nightstand of the papers I kept meaning to shred. I purged and organized all of R’s middle school work, and did the same for S’s school work from last year.

My (lofty) goal is to have purged and organized all of their school work by week’s end. After going through a third of a huge box of their work for 2012-2015 I’m really quite exhausted tho. I’m going to keep at it, but the self-care is important. Those were hard years for me and the weight is noted looking through their work. So perhaps by weekend’s end I will have finished that box. And then I’ll look around and see if there’s more and proceed gently from there.

Also, I’ve been waiting to hear back for over a month now from a new local place that takes donations (but only once a week). I may just drop a bunch off next week and talk to her in person. She is welcome to the (practically) whole of my possessions. It will all be going to people who really need it. If this is a good avenue, I can probably have the majority of stuff out by year’s end maybe. We’ll see.

The progress feels good. The productivity is vital. The eating, sleeping and self-care are currently all in line. It’s still not easy per se. But it’s going.

Handmade for somebody like me.

Some days are regular days. And some days are practice days. And some are a mixture moment to moment. Today was a practice day.

Today felt so….electric. I wanted to be present, but the present felt so…rushing toward Thursday–Thanksgiving. It felt simultaneously molasses and anticipation.

So I did the self-care thing. I watched Netflix (Parenthood) for the first time in weeks and I let myself have downtime for an hour and a half. And then it was shopping (looking for dried apples, with no luck) and reading groups at the elementary school. Then when L and I got home, we had lunch and then I let him watch a movie while I sorted through the kitchen drawer that becomes the home for all the things.

Since January I’ve been decluttering the house. And then life happens and I re-declutter. And each time is easier and faster and I throw more away. It’s a tangible progress that always feels better and better. And hardly ever do I drag my feet or hate it. It’s just part of the routine. Sometimes piles (there are hardly ever piles of anything in the house anymore, except here and there) stay for a while, but they don’t weigh me down. And then I get to them and they’re gone and I go “oh, hey, that’s nice”. So I’ve been tidying up those “oh hey” areas. It feels like good practice and good reinforcement. And it’s November and I’m planning to round out the year just as productively as I started it.

So today I practiced making the productive/progress-centric/healthy choices. Because my body thought it might want to make the food choices. And I wasn’t all about that.

One by one hidden up my sleeve.

I went through my jewelry bag tonight. It’s not something I ever seriously considered going through and purging. I wear almost none of it, but a lot of it holds sentimental value. But tonight I started going through it and it felt good to purge it of myself.

I threw out a quarter of it and packed up another quarter to sell or donate. And the rest is separated into moments of time or memory. One day I may even go through it again and find less to hold onto.

I hear the secrets that you keep.

At the end of December a friend of mine shared a 30 day decluttering challenge on her fb page. The universe must have aligned for me in that moment because I immediately signed up for it.

Like many other things, “want” doesn’t necessarily mean “action”. I had wanted to declutter for years, but anxiety and overwhelmingness and inefficient time management and children and fear, as well as countless other things, became the excuses that kept me from doing it.

Enter the challenge.

It was day two or three and I hadn’t done anything yet. I think I looked at the first email, but that was it. The kids and I were bowling with friends and my friend, Jaime mentioned the challenge! I was really excited she was in it and it gave me renewed strength. When we got home, I read the emails and got to work. I was meant to only clear out a bathroom, but I did the linen closet as well. It was invigorating.

Allie Casazza, the creator of the Declutter Like A Mother challenge, created this step-by-step tutorial for effective decluttering over the course of 30 days. Each of the four weeks was a different area. Bathroom. Kitchen. Kids’ toys. Clothes. 30 minutes a day. Stay focused. Stay intentional. Don’t make excuses. Save the things for later that trip you up.

And for whatever reason, it clicked.

It was easy to throw away the stuff in the kids’ bathroom. It was mostly easy to throw away crap from the linen closet. It was way more than 30 minutes that first day, but I was on a mission.

The following week was the kitchen. The focus was minimalism. The focus was “limit the dishes to what you need at one meal and wash and reuse” instead of a sinkful of dishes that takes an hour to wash. There was also the “trick” to store what you don’t need in another place, if you had a hard time getting rid of things. Then if after x amount of time you didn’t need it, totally donate it!

This tip helped me sooooo much. This one little “loophole” gave me the courage to purge the whole damn kitchen. It’s April now and I haven’t missed a single dish.

I finished decluttering the kitchen that first day of week two. Since L’s toys and pack ‘n play were in the kitchen as well, I just decided to declutter all of his crap too. Soon after, I created a toy/book corner for him and it completed the kitchen/dining room area. Oh, and I purged the pantry and fireplace/mantle.

It’s funny to me that now I can be all “oh, and I purged all this stuff” as tho it was effortless and didn’t take any time at all. Tra la la.

But it did take effort. Grueling effort. And intentional consistency. And taking breaks and coming back to it and commitment.

The following week, I spent over three days decluttering and cleaning S’s room.

Today it could use five minutes of tidying, but otherwise it’s just as remarkable as it was then. He loves it in there and his mental health is better for it.

The final week was my closet and clothes. I purged half my clothes and almost all of the storage clothes I had been keeping. I also came to learn that I had lost enough weight that all my pre-pregnancy clothes fit again.

Purging most of my clothes didn’t leave me many I loved and so I made a thrift store trip and picked up some pieces that make me feel comfortable and confident and grown up. Strange as it is, I can envision a world now made up of blouses instead of t-shirts.

That was my January.

The house is still mostly decluttered most days and it affords me slack days, when things come up or I just don’t wanna.

The garage is next on my list because alllll those bags and boxes of donations are still sitting out there. Not for fear of getting rid of them, but for anxiety of having to go to a place to drop them off. Baby steps. I can own my shortcomings, just as I own my awesome.

In the weeks to come, I’m going to share my cleaning story, as well as my success with delegating responsibilities to the kids. This evolution of 2018 has been grueling and rewarding and has highlighted all that I’m capable of. It’s been utterly amazing and I’m so proud of my intention, my bravery, and my progress.