Decluttering 2.0

I’ve made some headway on my decluttering. I now have my desk set up with my bills, correspondence, laptop, journal, and the current writing books that I’m reading. Though there are some knick-knacks there, for ME the empty space is amazing and I stared at it in wonder because it looks “empty” even though it’s not.

The empty space is making me rethink how I organize my room. I’m not used to empty space, I’ve always had every corner filled, every flat space covered, and even the floor isn’t immune when I wanted to store things. When something is “empty”, I just have the urge to put something there and cover it up.

Before I had to completely reorganize everything because of the remodel, I had a bout where I was slowly trying to reclaim the empty space in my room. I couldn’t stand the emptiness, so I took large sheets of paper, wrote “empty space” on them, and placed them in the parts of my room where I managed to clear the clutter. The signs kept the spaces from being “empty” and driving me up the wall and reminded me not to reclutter them with other things.

I’m wondering if I’m going to have to do something similar. If this emptiness on the desk bothers me, what about the large spaces between my bed and the walls? What about the flat spaces on my furniture?

So, I’m continuing to take this decluttering slow. I couldn’t handle it if it was done too fast, before I could get used to the empty space.

 

Reading…

The organizing book I’m using suggests to organize books by size. So, my books are neatly stacked in piles, waiting for me to find space to put them all away. I would like to to weed some of them out, but I don’t have the space to sort them by type and see the redundancies. I decided to read them by size, so I could go through them one pile at a time and not declutter something that I wanted to read first.

I’m reading the mass market paperbacks first. They’re the shortest, and there’s so many of them that it will save a considerable amount of space if a lot of them could go.

The first book in this endeavor is the Last of the Mohicans. It’s challenging, partially because of the vocabulary and partially because I find the characters stupid and inane.   I’m trying to accept that strong character development wasn’t a big issue then like it is now, that action and adventure were enough to carry a novel along and make it popular (similar with action movies now…..), but it’s still something that bothers me because after a while the action cliches wear themselves out and there isn’t anything of substance left.

It also bothers me that against my piles of books, my analysis of this one book doesn’t really make a difference. Even if I’ve got over my annoyance and read it (and maybe found something redeemable in it), I’ll still have a large pile of books to sort through, and maybe one of them will probably will annoy me just as much Mohicans does.

I think any other person would chuck Mohicans in the donate/trash pile easily, but in the cult I grew up in all classics (especially ones with no vulgarity and sex) were good books and if you didn’t like them then there was something wrong with you and you needed to read more into the text to get at least something out of it. I still have that mentality, even though I’ve left the cult.

So, I’ll probably try to finish Mohicans. It will definitely not be put in my re-read pile, so I can get rid of it then.

Snow…

We got 14 inches of snow today. I was humming “I’m dreaming of a white Halloween” to myself all day as the snow fell.

I went outside and rescued some potted plants, putting them in the basement where they could dry out without dripping water on anything important.

But it was hard choosing which plants to save. I love them all, but as I stood staring at them I kept imagining how much work they would need to care for them all when I already have so many houseplants. So I grabbed my hens & chicks, another succulent, my lily, and my geranium. It hurt leaving the rest outside to die.

But I read somewhere that Autumn and Winter are seasons of rest in nature. Perhaps it’s obvious to most people, but as I was staring at my plants it made me think that leaving them there was a period of rest for me. I can relax and focus on other projects and rebuy many of those plants again next spring.

And it reminded me that I have a hard time letting things go. I put hours of work into my plants and leaving them outside makes me feel like a quitter. (Even though most of them were annuals and would have died anyway.) I have this problem with many projects; I refuse to give up on things, investing more and more time while it gets harder and harder for me to quit.

Resting isn’t something I do well. I’ve read only one book in the last three months. I’m normally a great reader, and I’ve been mentally abusing myself for my lack of reading effort and “laziness”. I was inside and outside, working with my plants and reading up about them. But now that the weather is cold, I want to curl up in the bathtub with my favorite doesn’t-matter-if-gets-wet-paperback and lounge there for hours while the world freezes away.

And it took a freak snowstorm to remind me that I need a break. That things have their seasons for a reason and that it’s okay for me to change. I don’t have to like or do things all the time for me to enjoy them and I’m not a quitter for choosing to do something else with my time.

Decluttering….

The whole house (except my Father’s man-cave) has been getting repainted. It’s been hard to move everything away from the walls, try to eat while there’s a strong smell of paint in the air, and generally live life amidst piles of stuff that can’t be put away.

I have a LOT of stuff and it took me 6+ hours to move everything away from the walls of my bedroom. Right now it’s still there because I can’t move furniture until I vacuum the floor.

Seeing how much stuff I have though has been making me feel overwhelmed about sorting through things, putting things away, and figuring out where I want my furniture to go back to. I’m an ISTJ, so it’s really hard for me to live without planning things to the most minute detail. My room is too much, I just stare and can’t focus on getting it back together. So, I bought a book. I like this particular book because it makes a few references to the psychology of clutter, but it’s just at the beginning. The rest of the book is mainly lists on decluttering/organizing specific areas of your life. I thought if I can’t think of a plan on my own then I’ll buy a pre-made one.

I’ve started to get all my papers in some sort of order, but I need to buy a new file-box, so that’s been put on hold. I am a bit worried because some of my personal documents went missing during the reorganization and I have no idea where they went. I hope they turn up within the next couple weeks.

Now I’m trying to get all of my craft stuff together. It was scattered in various places around the house and putting it all in one piles is making me see how much there is of it.   I don’t want to throw things away (craft supplies are expensive!), but hopefully I can consolidate some things and have a smaller space-footprint.

Decluttering is hard for me. It’s hard for me to focus on one area at a time when my room is in such disaray, even though I know that I will get to everything eventually and that I don’t have to do it all at once. I just try not to look at it when I’m in my room and pretend it’s not there.

Insomnia

I don’t know if it’s related to the cult, health problems, sugar withdrawal from being on SCD, but I keep alternating between having intense insomnia and extreme need for sleep. Sometimes I sleep for 10 hours, but won’t be able to get to sleep until 2 am.

The strange result of all this is that I get woken up at various places in my sleep cycle and have been remembering a lot more of my dreams. I rarely have nice dreams, so it’s usually not IF it’s a nightmare, but how much of a nightmare it is.

The one this morning was interesting. There was a lot to it, but the most vivid part was where I was sitting in a kitchen sink and my dream Dad (who bore no actual resemblance to my real Dad) was pouring oil on me so he could burn me alive. My brother had died multiple times and used up all his lives and killing me would bring him back. My dream Dad loved him more than me.

The odd thing about my nightmares is that I’ve become used to this level of violence. I can’t control my dreams (like some people I know), but I was able to stay calm and told myself to stay asleep so I could see where the dream went. As this scene progressed I could see more and more how sad my father was about my dead brother and I felt sorry for him even as he kept pouring oil over me.

(This scene has some parallels in real life because my mother favored my sister when I was growing up.)

I used to think this was normal. TV is pretty violent, so I chalked it up to movie/TV overexposure. But even when I went on a media-fast and cut those things out, they still continued. And when a group of friends and I were talking about dreams, I was the only one who remembered them from a young age and who had so many nightmares.

I am hoping that as I progress on SCD/sort through cult trauma/whatever it is that’s causing these, that they’ll eventually go away.

SCD: Day 5

I have cheated a little bit. A couple cookies here and there, a gumdrop of my favorite Halloween Candy (Bat Dots), some bacon and  other small things I can’t remember. But considering how much I can eat and how much of a sweet tooth I have, I think I’ve done well.

The biggest hurdle thus far is that I’m the only person doing SCD and people keep leaving their cookies and sweets on the counter and putting their illegal left-overs in the fridge. I constantly have to look at food I can’t eat.

Another difficulty is actually eating ENOUGH food. Now that starches are gone, I’m eating a lot more less-calorie-dense foods like apples, salads (with no dressing), and lean meats. My housemate jokes that I’m always eating, even though I’ve dropped a few pounds. When I’m full from dinner, I leave any leftovers on the counter and eat them a few hours later because I’m hungry again.

I am feeling better.

SCD: Day 1

Today I’m starting the full Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD). I’ve been rotating food families since July (that’s what some food allergy books suggested) and slowly been weeding out the junk, so this won’t be a cold turkey change for me.

I also have a LOT going on the next upcoming weeks, so I’ll be skipping the intro and just eating legal foods. This goes against what BTVC suggests, but the reality is that I don’t have a few days to eat chicken and carrot soup and go through intense die-off.

These are some fried apples that I made with peeled apples, chopped walnuts, grape juice, cinnamon and honey. They definitely could have been better (I’m not a great cook), but I am also reminding myself that I’m unfairly comparing my humble (if legal) attempt to Cracker Barrel’s sublime (and illegal) apples. My taste-buds have certainly changed since July, but I’m sure it will take a while for the change to catch up to my childhood favorite comfort foods.

That fact that apples are one of my favorite foods is why I picked this recipe as one of the first ones I’d master. One of my favorite pick-me-ups when I’m having a bad day is getting a favorite snack, but SCD forbids all of my other comfort foods. I’ve never met an apple I didn’t like, so fried apples it was. 😛

Another change in my eating habits is that I no longer eat large meals. It happened gradually, but I went from eating large meals to eating many small portions throughout the day. My stomach feels a LOT better, even if I have to put up with foraging jokes from non-SCD family members who think I’m always eating. I plan on keeping this up with SCD.

Science Fiction

One of the best things that happened to me right after I left the cult was that I discovered Doctor Who.

I had seen some science fiction, but they were mostly movies and a few random episodes of various shows. I hadn’t watched anything consistently. Most of the science fiction I did see had a strange grounding in reality: Logan’s Run was a dystopia about a computer running the nanny state, The Forbidden Planet was a remake of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, The X-Files were basically G-men who met aliens, The Prisoner was more about psychological manipulation than extreme science, etc.

Most of the science fiction also had a strong “us vs. them” mentality, which was something the cult taught. I related most to the dystopias where the world was ending and the strong (and often self-righteous) few were the only ones that survived.

After I left, my entertainment tastes started to change. Suddenly I didn’t care if what I watched offended other people or if it didn’t agree with their morals or not. And when someone recommended Doctor Who, I watched every episode of the new series.

The show helped break a lot of attitudes I didn’t realize that I’d carried with me outside the cult. The show wasn’t loaded with sex, despite the romantic tension between the Doctor and some of his companions. The girls weren’t chaperoned and had no male family members to keep them safe, oftentimes jumped into situations where they were in a lot of danger, and still didn’t get ravaged by some worldly, sensual male that wasn’t “saved”.

The whole premise of the show is the fact that people of differing ages and genders can get along, be good friends and trust each other in difficult circumstances. Which is exactly the opposite of what the cult taught. Younger people were always wrong and young women could never be trusted with older men. When I tried to have simple conversations with men in the church, their wives were always at their elbow giving me me looks and watching my slightest move.

That mentality is a hard one to break, even if you know it’s paranoid and wrong. It really helped me to see an example, even if it was a TV show from across the pond. The emphasis on friendship and trust was a much welcome change from the normal doomsday stuff that I was used to.

Time Capsule

Another self-improvement project that helps me is my Time Capsule journal. It’s similar to my topics du jour journal, but it’s scheduled at the end of every month and I write about 20+ topics in one sitting. Over time, these entries add up and I can easily see long-term patterns that I might not notice in my regular journal. Thus far, the topics are divided into several categories:

*Possessions, personal space
*Physical health
*mental health
*Relationships with friends and individual family members
*Tastes/likes/preferences (books, movies, music, etc.)
*Education/general self-improvment

I try to keep my entries short, usually a paragraph per topic. This makes it easy when I want to review many months at a time.

Another major difference between this and the topics du jour journal is that this is not a TO-DO list. This is a things I have DONE list. My journals were so self-condemning that I decided that I needed a place where there would be no shoulds or shouldn’ts.

Keeping track of my relationships this way has been invaluable in helping me to maintain them or to notice if things are one-sided. I could prove an ex-cult friend was avoiding me because she hadn’t socialized with me in 7 months. I knew she was busy, but when I counted the months I knew she couldn’t be THAT busy. After I exited, she offered to socialize with me ONLY if I wanted to discuss the reasons why I disagreed with the cult.

I also like to keep track of movies/books/music because I associate events in my life to the media I was enjoying at the time. The death of a family member last year is associated with “The Westing Game”. Fun times with my friends are associated with movies we watched together. When I listen to particular hymns, many memories of the cult come flooding back.

Sometimes the entries are too painful to write. I once took a 7 month sabbatical from this journal because things in life were too stressful to even attempt to summarize into short paragraphs. Instead, I vented long, rambling entries into my regular journal. I felt slightly guilty, but I knew that once things settled down I would be able to write in it again. And I did.

The cult, my health……and halloween

As I’ve mentioned before, the cult didn’t help my health. Every physical problem supposedly had a root in a spiritual problem.

The cult also hated and misunderstood Halloween. I heard endless sermons on the evils of Satanism, wiccanism, New-Age-ism, etc. Everything relating to this day was EVIL.

Except candy.

At the “Harvest Party” (Halloween substitute) kids played games and got to take bags of candy home. Adults brought candy to the monthly potluck. They used candy bought on sale to make other goodies. And this emphasis on holiday sweets continued all the way through Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The cult members got stouter. The older ones complained about their health problems and doctors visits. Women felt guilty because they felt the extra weight made them less appealing to their husbands. People became sick easily, catching colds and the flu and then spreading it among the cult because they felt guilty about missing meetings and wouldn’t stay home. It became a standard joke how much the pastor’s family would all get sick and then keep giving it to each other.

And all these were considered spiritual problems. They were something to be endured because all burdens supposedly came from God and he wouldn’t put people through trials that they could not bear. People prayed and hoped the fat and the sickness would go away even while they put on their plastic smiles and pretended they were OK.

Only one member came close to separating her spiritual issues from her physical issues, but it took a tumor and being in the hospital for 3 weeks for it to happen. And even after all that, she still tried to follow the cult’s (unspoken but still expected) dress codes by wearing her high heels even though she could barely walk. It was strange to hear her talk about her diet and her physical therapy while she barely hobbled up the pews in her obviously uncomfortable shoes.

Because of all this self-destructive behavior, they always deemed their problems worse than mine. They thought me unspiritual because I didn’t thank God for the blessings I did have and didn’t empathize with their destructive behavior. This became worse when I started reading books about yoga and meditation instead of the Bible and their cult materials when I wanted to learn about pain management.

When I left, many of them were still sick. Sicker than the Wiccans, Satanists, and other people they considered spiritually beneath them. And they still think that avoiding a few plastic witches, trick-or-treaters, and The Great Pumpkin will keep them spiritually pure so that God will be good to them and cure their health problems.