The things we do to distract ourselves 🤪

Just a generation of organizers.

In a fidgety fit of fidgeting, I decided to accept that my brain wasn’t going to work and it was time to give up for the day.

I scanned for a low-hanging-fruit task I could do to ease the waves of anxiety and distract me from endless phone notifications.

The task was cleaning out the drawers of my desk and organizing my pens and it was genius.

You know that feeling once you start something and instantly regret it? That happened.

But in an effort to salvage the day and my sanity, I kept on.

🌀

Lately I keep complaining about storage.

Like everyone else in NYC, space is a precious commodity: Hard to come by and extremely overpriced. Even my iCloud never seems to be enough.

Every day since I got back from England, I keep waltzing up and down my apartment — for the step count sure — but also to strategize the space. How can I make better use of it? What can be consolidated? Where do I put all of this anxious energy? And my favorite question of all: WHY THE FUCK DON’T I PUT ANYTHING BACK PROPERLY? 🙃

I decided that the bit by bit approach was best. Every day, I do a little something. Last week it was a tote and grocery bag purge. The other day, my socks got a seeing to.

But yesterday, it was the drawers of this poor frail Ikea desk, purchased with a stipend from my last remote job and packed to the brim with notes to self, brand stickers, mad notebooks, and cute little ornaments I seem to collect from random places.

It wasn’t the kind of task that was too unpleasant either. There was enough tactile things to bring waves of nostalgia; like stickers from the floral business I once co-owned. Biz cards featuring a drawing of me my friend did that I used to hand out everywhere like a nerd when I first moved here?! A “Xanax” pin from who knows where and a card my bestie gave me when I was feeling sad once. And then there was pens. That surprised me.

I didn’t know that I was such an avid pen collector. There was one from my first ever ever to The Tropicale in Palm Springs, although it was not nearly as colorful as the restaurant itself. Another from a diner in McMinnville (Oregan), where a friend and I ate through a hangover during a wedding weekend. There was even one from Casino, the downtown restaurant that someone told me translates to brothel in Italian. Fun.

I must have gotten rid of about 40 different pens and countless pieces of paper and in doing so I felt a bit sad. It’s not that I felt a deep attachment to the objects in particular, but more so this idea that we constantly have to purge space to make room for new things. It’s one thing to do it out of choice but another when the choice isn’t yours to make. That’s the part that made me sad. And sure, maybe we have too much stuff. We definitely have too much stuff. But there’s a reason why objects make up a home.

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I struggle a lot with my relationship to taking pics on my iPhone and sharing them with the world. Some days a snap of my breakfast feels justified and other days, who gaf?

But in cleaning out these particular drawers, I was reminded of what a gift it is to be able to capture a moment in time. To look back and remember. To feel what can sometimes be fleeting. To hold onto something that takes up no physical space.

Every day we’re seeing first hand people losing their homes. And while material objects are not the be all end all (duh) many of them are memories collected.

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This bit by bit approach has actually been really soothing. It’s a reminder to do one thing at a time. Commit to and complete something and then move on.

As I said to my girl in a voice note this morning: “Revolutions don’t happen with one person doing everything all of a sudden. It’s the small daily steps we take, finding ways to give back and connect that make the big fuck off changes in the end.”

I wish it was more poetic than that. But sometimes that’s all you have.