eating elephants

Lucy didn't appreciate my analogy this morning when I told her we were going to eat an elephant. She doesn't want to eat elephants. I got some serious stink eye over that.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Bringing all the stuff from storage has been utterly paralyzing. I expected it to be easy to deal with and now its all dug through, sitting everywhere, dumped out....for 3 days I've tried to deal with it and just felt frozen. Unable to cope. I found myself withdrawing into the crankyness that existed before.  I also began to slack on what was pretty solid before....in that state of "i can't fix it right, so why bother at all".

The good news is, this is the biggest hurdle. Once I get through this, I'm home free...the rest is bits and pieces and much easier and much LESS stuff.

The bad news is, I have to get through it. One. Bite. At. A. Time.

But I did wake up this morning feeling more prepared to tackle it so after I finish this cup of coffee....I'm gonna go for it. I decided that I'm going to just approach it KonMari style and start by sorting it. Most of it is kid stuff, memorabilia, sports stuff, camping stuff, tools. So I'm going to just make piles. Then once I see what all I have, I can decide what to discard and what to save. This is really the bones of the KonMari method anyway....traditional organizational techniques teach us to rush out and buy cute storage containers and figure out our ways to organize our mounds of crap. By categorizing it and looking at everything in that category, you can see where you have duplicates. On one of the KonMari pages I'm on, I saw a woman post a pile of about 15-20 sets of nail clippers. She was laughing because she had been under the impression that they didn't have a single pair left and after she finished her KonMari process, she found that she had plenty.

It also helps my adhd brain to be able to just focus on the one thing, to put myself in the mindframe of that category. Rather than "oh, here is camping stuff, I have to remember that I have this, I wonder if i should keep this, and here are 3 soccer balls, oh and more camping stuff...by the time i've picked up another item, I've forgotten what I needed to remember about the first item!

Marie Kondo calls cleaning and organizing a "Festival". Well....I'm the Queen of this Festival, so lets roast an elephant and get to eating!