Growing up Part One

Growing up. De-cluttering. Reorginizing. Making over and Staring over. Part one!

Not long after my mom, dad, brother and myself moved here by parents split up. Long long complicated story (that I don’t think my parents would be happy if I posted on the internet) short, my mom ended up getting married to our neighbor across the street. The move was a very easy one. We moved in laundry baskets. I’m serious. The house that I see when I look out of the windows at the front of my house now, was the house we moved into when we first moved here. Right across the street. And we have been here ever since. When mom and step dad got together we had a lot of stuff. Even though my parents got rid of a lot, we still crammed two families and two houses worth of stuff into one house (and my step dad’s house was/is smaller than the house that we were living in. The attic is totally full of stuff and we have one of those big storage spaces to keep the rest of our stuff in. But our house is still pretty full and every time someone buys something new and brings it home, it only adds to the large amount of stuff we already have.
Growing up, my bedroom became an extreme example of this and being a kid and a teenager, I never wanted to clean or get rid of stuff. Sometimes I watch that show hoarders and it scares me. I’d like to think that my life will never get like that but I am sure those people said and think the same. Now, no. My room was never stacked from floor to ceiling or anything like that but it was pretty messy and a lot of it was just over the years I had accumulated way way WAY too much stuff and a lot of times instead of properly cleaning it, I just crammed and hid stuff where ever I could to make it look a bit more picked up. My room was so bad that while I was at college over the last two years my mom was not able to once go in and dust and vacuumed it. EW. I for at least the past three years the only thing I really ever did in my room was sleep and change clothes. I would always use the hall bathroom to do hair and make up. It just got to be overwhelming but I still had little motivation to clean it.

Growing up and maturing and maybe even the further development of my prefrontal cortex has really amazed me over the past year because I have really noticed the changes in myself and what I want and how I think and act. How I felt about the mess in my room changed, mostly because I loved keeping my dorm room at school looking nice and I loved the clutter free life style I had at school. For one of my education classes last semester I had to work with a first grade class twice a week. Over that time my clothing taste changed too and my motto for the last 6 months has become “in a year, it’s not going to matter.” – This is something one of my older sorority sisters shared with me (her mom shared it with her) and it has really helped me not to get too caught up in the dramas of life and to let things go and remember what things are really important. If I am dealing with something that is not going to matter in 2 months, 8 months, a year, 5 years, 10 years, then it really is not that big of a deal. One of my news years resolutions for 2010 was to worship more. That is changing my life beautifully. It is just kind of cool feeling myself growing up and seeing the changes and having an awareness of it.

Since I had about three weeks from the time that I got home from school until I started working ( I am a full time Nanny over the summer and had to wait for my kids to get out of school before my job really started.) I took that time to clean my room. Honestly, it was really easy. My thought process was: Everything I NEEDED I had taken to school with me and there was not anything that I had at home (other than my pet turtles) that I missed while I was at school. So. I got rid of a lot of stuff. I just kept throwing stuff out and making piles to donate. Now, a lot of things like my desk supplies from school, my dishes, some books, bedding and other things did go to the storage space where they will stay until I go back to school in August. I donated 3 trash bags of clothes (and counting).. Some things I really couldn’t let go of and I reorganized the space in my room to accommodate and find a place for them. It was a little difficult to let go of other things, gifts that people gave me, items that I have literally had forever, memories and ect. What helped me make those choices this time that was different from other times was that I was donating all of these items instead of selling them at a yard sale or giving them to GoodWill. So, I had the mind set of, I am giving this to someone who needs it. I had a friend tell me that I went a bit overboard with that idea when I was going through my clothes because I got rid of pretty much everything. When you hold up two very similar black shirts that both look good on you and stuff but you think to yourself, I only really truly need one and there are people really truly need one. I don’t know, I didn’t have the heart to keep them both.

Anyways, I got my room cleaned up and did a lot of downsizing and reorganizing. It feels really good to have a clean space and a space that I control, not one that leaves me feeling overwhelmed. It is refreshing. Then I got my hair cut. I have always kept my hair pretty long so I got it cut up to my shoulders. I didn’t like it at first but now I think it is pretty cute. It is kind of a strange concept that you can cut your hair, change your clothes get a tattoo or piercing but you are still the same person. You don’t really change because of those things. Last summer I got my belly button pierced. I had wanted it since I was 16 and my mom made me wait until I was 18. Just to make sure I really wanted it, I waited until I was almost 20. I kept thinking that changing my body like that was going to somehow change me and I was rather surprised when it didn’t.