Paper Clutter Overwhelm
Paper clutter overwhelm is pretty debilitating. Years of magazines, paid bills, donation funding requests that you’ve stopped looking at, grocery fliers, old newspapers, and your kids school papers that you didn’t know what to do with, get to a point that you start throwing anything that comes in on top of all of it, into the extra room that started as an office. Then, other things began joining the paper because it became “the messy room”. Things that you didn’t know what to do with and were trying to keep out of the rest of the house, hopefully behind a closed door.
So eventually, either you are really tired of what it looks like and how it feels and you have dreams of getting that room cleared out so you can use it or a friend knows that you aren’t happy with the messy space and gives a suggestion to get help. Usually that’s when I get called. It’s not easy tackling this kind of clutter on your own. You want to do it. You know you need to do it. There is hope that it can be done. It’s easier though, to just close the door and forget about it for the moment, but the thoughts about the clutter don’t go away and it can drag you down. The frustration, the sadness at not taking care of it, when you know you could. The thoughts that drive you crazy about what you SHOULD get done. You beat yourself up over and over.
Well here’s the thing, it really isn’t so tough to take care of. My passion is helping people let go of the things that they’ve been holding on to for years, tidying up their spaces and then freeing them up to get on to doing the things that they love to do. There are things in there that they know they really want to let go of, but don’t know where to start. When I come into a home, I assess the situation and see where we will start. I get you ready with the trash bags, the recycle bins and the boxes or bins for separating the things to keep. I let you know where we will begin and where we will end, with ideas for the future to let you know that it doesn’t stop once everything is put away, given away, or thrown away.
Then we begin. When the game packman came out years ago, that was one of the only games I ever enjoyed playing on the computer and I equate de-cluttering kind of to that experience. We chomp away at the clutter bite by bite, clearing out the clutter and by the end, it feels like we have really won the game. Papers are gone through. You decide if it needs to be saved or go into the trash. We make files as we go along or else put the things into the files on hand. It’s just a step at a time and it doesn’t have to be that serious a thing. I mean it is serious, because a cluttered space can be very debilitating and I do take it very seriously, but once someone has the desire and makes the decision to do something about it, it immediately affects you. You feel a lightness. You start to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
I go a little over the moon at the end of these sessions. People can’t believe that it can be so different from when we started and it was pretty painless. It’s about having a tidy room, everything in it’s accurate place and relief from paper clutter overload.