It’s easy to be overwhelmed when you’re surrounded, as I am at home, by stuff. Small stuff. Big stuff. All mixed in.

Take any container of any size, and fill it with random toy-bits. Put that somewhere. A kind friend gives you more toys. Give ’em to the kids. They explode into a billion plastic pieces. Put those pieces somewhere, like into a bowl from the kitchen. Later, put the bowl into a box of more stuff.

We’re generally clean. There’s just too much stuff.

An organizer’s mind

I look at a box of stuff, and feel a need to reunite one shitty plastic palm tree with all the other shitty plastic pieces of the beach set we bought at an airport one time. I can’t scan all of this stuff from a distance. I see each and every single thing. Worse, I want each thing to be with other things like it.

I want to organize. But there’s no time to organize our family’s stuff. That wears on me: the shame of having stuff, and wasting it.  The desire to do something good with the stuff, to share it–and yet how? To whom should it go, and how can I make it easy for them? Should I really spend the next 3 weekends sorting through stuff? What about, like, playing with my kids instead?

It’s not just me

I’m not alone in feeling nutty about stuff. There’s this article, which says UCLA researchers found:

“The study found that our need to reward ourselves materially may actually increase our stress—at least for moms. In their video tours, mothers use words like ‘mess,’ ‘not fun’ and ‘very chaotic’ to describe their homes.”

And a friend of mine, Meg, just shared this article on Facebook: Let’s Cut the Crap and Kiss the Goody Bags Goodbye.

Making it better

Yes, I am down with rejecting the goody bags! Forget the damn plastic junk. Forget giving it and forget taking it. Let’s just stop turning our hard-earned dollars into plastic landfill.

Oh, and I hired a home organizer. Things are already improving. More to come!

– Margot