A Piece Of My Heart

Clutter and Time Capsules

How do your surroundings affect your mental health? Does a clean or well-decorated home improve your mood at all? Are there any specific decorations in your home that lift your spirits?

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Soooooo … sorry in advance for the stupidly domestic post

I am neither a very neat person nor a very messy person. I tend to let items accumulate or get stacked up, but I mostly always know where things are and can find them easily enough. I do get frustrated though when I can’t find something of mine when I thought I knew where it was. Maybe this is something to do with having a younger sister growing up and needing to be very possessive with my belongings. I’ve lived with my boyfriend for 2 and a half years now, and while I’m very thankful he does our laundry sometimes or puts things away in the kitchen (bless him), I get annoyed when something I use often is not returned to the place where I would have put it. I’ve become used to living alone, so I always knew where my things were. Not to mention that I’ve never had a lot of things to keep track of moving back and forth to Hawaii, but now that I’m “settling down,” I’ve had more time to accumulate more things and evidently lose track of more things.

Bf can tolerate a little more clutter than I can, and I can tolerate a little more dirt/dust than he can. It’s funny when we clean because he tends to do the sweeping, dusting, wiping, vacuuming, etc, while I tend to do the tidying up and putting clutter back where it belongs. Of course, it always happens that it’s mostly his things adding to the clutter, so I get frustrated by not knowing where to put them, knowing how upset I would get if he put my things away in places they didn’t go. So instead, we’re trying to be a good couple by switching cleaning priorities to satisfy the other person’s needs. Therefore, I do the dirt cleaning while he does the clutter cleaning. Any clutter of mine that he finds goes on my side of the bed so I can put it away myself, which works for me. However, all of his clutter he cleans up just ends up going in a random drawer or the back of the closet. He calls the drawers filled with random stuff his “time capsules.” Ugh … well, at least the clutter is off the counter

Now, about these “time capsules” … It’s starting to get a bit too much for me. I get in these moods where I want to clean them out and donate everything or just throw it away, but I need his help to determine what is valuable to him and what isn’t. It doesn’t help that I moved into his house, so he had already been accumulating stuff before I was there and has a lot more of it. He had to build a shed for his shed since there wasn’t enough room in the first shed … Okay, point is (and I’m trying to get back to the prompt here) that clutter irks me. I get frustrated when I can’t find my stuff and when the clutter makes the house feel cramped. I get claustrophobic and have to watch something soothing like “Hoarders” to see someone else purge their stuff. I think I subconsciously feel that the space in which I live is a representation of my mind and the messiness in my house is mirrored in my mind. Cleaning up the clutter is a mental purge as well as a physical one and helps me feel calm.

I think my plan, that I just came up with right now, is to force the bf to do a spring cleaning with me. It will be too overwhelming to do the whole house at once, so we will focus on one room at a time. I’ll get out big bags for trash and donatables and we’ll work our way through the house and through every single time capsule. Like in the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, we will ask about each item: “Does it bring me joy?” If not, it goes away. The closet and bedroom are the most important to me, so we’ll probably start there.

TLDR: For a short answer to the prompt – My surroundings, especially clutter in my house, 100% does affect my mental health as if my living space is a physical representation of my mental state. Purging clutter is cathartic. It’s not so much about the décor for me as about the accumulation of “stuff.”