Hey Friends,
When I’m stressed, I clean and organize.
It’s one of my more useful mental health quirks.
I wrote recently about my spring-cleaning house purge. I’ve been decluttering and as a result, I’m finding so much more value in the things I’m choosing to keep. I’m reminded that when we have too many choices, we can get paralyzed.
While Marie Kondo told us to only keep what sparks joy, I find the following advice to be even more graphically helpful:
That’s been working well for me as I donate or toss things that I no longer value. But I was a bit stumped the other day when I came across dozens of my old journals. They spanned three decades and came in various styles: functional spiral notebooks, cutesie designs, and serious Moleskins. While a few had been abandoned partway through, most of the notebooks were filled with words on every single page.
Flipping through them felt…tumultuous. There was so much suffering on those pages that my chest tightened and my shoulders tensed. I write when I’m in pain—I turn to my journal to release some of the torment I don’t know how to handle. Whether that suffering was circumstantial or self-imposed, it all came rushing back to me. There was deep anguish over some guy who barely registers in my memory, and disappointments that seemed tragic, but clearly worked out for the best—lots of regular young-person journal stuff.
But then there were other things, that in retrospect were significantly more fucked up than I had registered them at the time. It was difficult to see my younger self trying to make sense of the senseless, trying to wrestle with the challenges of my own mind, trying to navigate the grown-up world of the film industry as a child, uncertain how to survive as a hyper-sensitive, introverted soul.
It was like watching a turtle who had been flipped on her back in the hot desert sun, she was struggling, and there was no way to help her.