Thursday, September 26, 2013

Coming Out of the Closet

My closet contains as much junk as the jalopy from The
Grapes of Wrath.
My bedroom closet is extremely, extremely messy, and there is tons of stuff coming out of it. More specifically, it resembles the car they packed up in the Grapes of Wrath, with all kinds of junk everywhere in huge piles, and no place to put anything. Just last spring break my closet was neat. I remember cleaning the closet out then because it had previously looked like the clothing section of WalMart at 6 PM on Christmas Eve, with sweaters and pants thrown everywhere, and large mounds of shoes underneath skirts and jackets. I am a very neat and organized person, but my orderliness does not extend to closets for some reason. All of the closets in my house have experienced the vortex of disorder that my being near a closet somehow seems to generate. It is like if I get within three feet of a closet, some sort of invisible electromagnetic force begins to act on the contents of said closet, gyrating them around in tiny concentric circles before trying to launch them into space. Fortunately, the roof of my house prevents items from ending up on Jupiter or in the Asteroid Belt, though that result would probably help me pare down the junk in my house!

The reason for my messy closets is threefold. First, when I have junk that I am not ready to part with, but that I don’t know what to do with, I just shove it in a closet. Second, cleaning my closets often actually makes them messier. And, third, I rarely get rid of anything, yet I always seem to accumulate new stuff. Since I know that a treatise on my closets will be particularly fascinating reading material, I will elaborate on them below. But, first, I must describe to you an element of my OCD that contributes to my high levels of closet dysfunction: the tendency toward hoarding behavior. Now, first, let me just reassure you that I am most certainly NOT a hoarder. I do not have so much junk in my house that you have to clear a path just to walk from the front door to the living room, nor do I stack old takeout containers in the corner of my bedroom. I am a little bit of what you might call a pack rat, although I do often attempt to fight this tendency so that my house does not look like 35 people live in it and have tried to cram all of their stuff into it.

Rather, I have a lot of trouble getting rid of things, even things that I have no use for that are really getting in my way, Many full-blown  hoarders often have some form of OCD, and having trouble  getting rid of things, even inconsequential things is definitely an OCD behavior. When I have trouble throwing something away, I often know it is useless and I want to get rid of it, but I have this feeling that something bad will happen if I get rid of it. Sounds weird, right? Well, this type of magical thinking is actually quite common for people with OCD. You can read more about it here.

So, there I sit with the decorative box my BareEscentuals spring makeup collection came in. It is a nice box, and it is meant to be reused. However, since I have about six other reusable, decorative makeup boxes, I do not need it and it is taking up space that I do not have. I could give it to someone else, or just take it to my school and put it in the teachers’ lounge for some other teacher to use (Teachers are always looking for containers to store things in.) However, instead of doing either of these things, I hold onto it. This scenario leads me back to my three reasons for my messy closets by bringing us to reason number one: When I have something like the decorative makeup box that I can’t seem to get rid of, I just shove it in a closet so that I don’t have to think about how I should get rid of it, and also so that the rest of my house looks neat.

All of my closets hold junk like this. My bedroom closet holds shoe and apparel related junk. My bathroom closet holds medical and hygiene related junk. And my dining room closet holds household staple-related junk. And then there is the blue room. The blue room is the second bedroom in my house, which began as a place to put one of my cat boxes, a place to hold my shoe wall, and a craft storage area, but has turned into the Bermuda Triangle in my home. The blue room is like a giant closet, in that it is the catchall junk repository in my house. When people come over I just shut the door, and if they ask what’s inside I play an audio file of fake scratching and banging noises on my iPhone and tell them that Cousin Jimbo, who’s “not right in the head” lives in there.

When I clean my closets, I spend long amounts of time
staring off into space wishing the Closet Fairy would come
fix everything.
The second reason for my messy closets is that cleaning them often actually just adds to the mess. Here is what I mean: I will get the ambitious idea that I am going to clean out my bedroom closet and organize my clothes. I will remove all of the junk from the floor of my closet, placing clothing on the bed, and shoes on the floor or on the low dresser at the foot of my bed. I will notice that many of the clothes need to be put on hangers, and that there is not nearly enough room in the closet to put all of the clothes back in in anything approaching an organized manner. Having spent two hours just taking things out of my closet, I am sick of cleaning and have not one iota of motivation to hang anything up. Defeated, I just shove everything back in the closet, but this time there is more stuff, because as I removed clothing from the closet I also took items that were hanging halfway off hangers completely off, and now they are added to the pile on the floor, and I am reminded that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The third, and perhaps largest reason for the mess in my closets is that, while I do not get rid of much, I constantly seem to acquire new stuff. Now, please don’t think that I am buying stuff at an inordinately fast rate. Instead, imagine if you still owned all of the shoes you had purchased in the past 15 years, even the old tennis shoes that you have worn out, but that you keep because you might use them to work in the yard. Even for someone who buys shoes at a normal rate, storage would be at a premium. (Although, I must admit, I might have just a wee bit of a shoe fixation.) The same thing happens with all manner of items in my home, and old, useless things are taking up storage space so there is no room for new things. I know that the solution is to get rid of some stuff, but I am not quite ready to do that yet.


I don’t know if any of you have a closet vortex similar to mine in your homes, but if you do, then maybe you understand my struggle. Maybe, like me, you know what you need to do to fix your problem, but you find it difficult to do so. Right now, I will continue to battle the clutter, and I will take comfort in the knowledge that, if I ever do take on my closets, I will be able to have one heck of a yard sale!

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