Purge the Sh*t! (this is also posted over at KissandTellGirls, but I wanted it on my blog as well.)
It’s me again. You won’t see me here tomorrow though. I’ll be guest blogging at Phoebe Jordan’s place about Sugar Rush. What else, right? Grins…
Mari and I switched days this week when we thought yesterday was going to be used by another person. You’ll see her tomorrow!
I followed a link from Yahoo to a blog that I followed to another blog that I…well, you get the idea. These are not author or reader blogs. These are not industry or publisher or editor blogs. They have nothing to do at all with our business. I was telling someone yesterday that I don’t read a lot of ‘our business’ blogs. I read some, a few, but some of the content is mirrored from one blog to another, so I spend blog reading time (yeah right, like I have any extra that is designated like that) on reading personal blogs. (How many times did I say blogs in that paragraph? My editors would clobber me…)
The one I ended up on today is called fit this, girl. She’s a runner, a freelance writer, blogger. I read a few of her posts, including yesterday’s about the activity pyramid which I think is cool. But, the one that caught my eye was one she had titled Great Purge of 2009. Basically, it was about purging the sh*t. Decluttering. Organizing. Down-sizing. I need to do all of that. Not just my closets, which I did back in December, but the downstairs closets, my son’s toys, the boxes of school art projects, the paperbacks, the stuff in boxes in the garage that I haven’t looked at in 3 years.
I read another blog a few years ago where the person said to take photos of memorable items and then toss the items. It was a way to keep the memory but chuck the actual clutter. Yes, even those momentos from high school and college and all the weddings you were in, and this birthday and that anniversary…if it’s all in a box, what good is it doing?
We all have stuff we know we cannot and will not ever part with until we’re dead. We all have things grandma or mom made or that grandpa or dad built. I’m not talking about that kind of stuff, but the stuff that we collect, and then we have to buy more stuff to put the old stuff in, thereby creating more clutter, more that we have to deal with. And maybe it’s just me that has all this crap around, but somehow I highly doubt it.
There’s the question of why we hold onto thing and for me…it’s just easier at the time to throw it in a box to deal with later than to deal with it RIGHT NOW! I hope to break that bad habit this year.
I read on another blog a few years ago about a 6-month box. You take whatever you’re cleaning at the time and unsure what to do with and put it in a box. Label the box with what it is and put the date on it. Mark 6 months later on your calendar that way when the 6 month date comes around, you’ll know it’s time to deal with that box. The trick is…if you haven’t opened it in all that time, you. don’t. need. it. Of course, ask me how many 6 month boxes I have? LOL…
It’s a good practice though. I have tried it before and it did work. I just haven’t been all that diligent with it of late. fit this, girl Mary talks about how she looses entire weekends cleaning or doing laundry and yeah, she’s single, but it still applies to all of us. We all talk about how it takes us a whole day or weekend to clean this, do those clothes, etc… I would rather not lose that much time. It clutters our brains, too. We know we need to write, but we also know we need to clean and do laundry and often one or both gets put off in favor of the other or neither.
Though, again, I could just be the only one.
I need to purge the sh*t. I need to clean the house, the garage, declutter, and organize what’s left. I need to clear the space around me so that my mind is clear, my spirit is clear for me to create the erotic romance stories I love. Honestly speaking, it’s one of the reasons I love my itouch so much. I rarely buy print books anymore because I don’t want the clutter of them. I don’t want them to take up space I really don’t have. My itouch organizes the books for me in one small device and I can have as many books as I want. Of course, no only the itouch can do that, but, that’s the one I’ve got and that’s the one I can relate to.
There’s a scene in Sugar Rush (y’all knew I was gonna throw in a bit of promo here somewhere) where Jane takes down the box her ex had left for her of all the things from their years together. (Most of us have or had boxes like this) She realizes that by hanging on to it, she’s also hanging on to the past, the memories, and the hurt and that it’s got more of a hold on her than she has on it. In order for her to move on, to let go and give in to Graham, she must give up the box and the hurt and make a conscious step into something new and different.
That scene is personal to me because I know I’ve done that, and it doesn’t have to be tangible items. It can be an email, an IM conversation that we hold on to, that we keep going back to, that we can’t let go of (talking about painful ones).
We should live and move forward and not hold so tightly to the past, to the things. We should instead have more time for what and who we love.
There were other great things I pulled out of this fit this, girl’s blog, like the when you go shopping question list…
~lissa
