"I'M SURE THIS WON'T BE A PROBLEM LATER"
[23/3/2025]I have a really bad habit. I've had this really bad habit for at least eight years now, and I'm dealing with the consequences of that bad habit in action eight years after the fact.
There's a Calvin & Hobbes comic I remember reading when I was a kid. Calvin says something like, "what's the point of showering if I'm just going to get dirty again?" I think I might've accidentally taken that sentiment to heart. Well... uh, not the showering part - I swear I shower regularly!
My ex frequently got irritated at me because I'd constantly leave the cabinets open after I grabbed something out of it, and I never noticed I consistently did that until she brought it up to me in a (justifiably) fed-up manner where she asked for an explanation. I paused, thought about it for a minute, then responded, "...I'll probably need something out of the cabinet later anyways, right?" That was my actual response, the response of a complete buffoon.
So, I go to therapy for a while for the sake of bettering my mental health, and identify that I've got some bad habits. Sure, big whoop, most people do. The difficult part is untangling the mess I've made of them now trapped in my neurological centers. I knew I had some bad habits I dislike having, but what exactly are they, and how do I start to change?
My now-fiance said early on in our relationship, after noticing something similar when it came to organizing my things half-assedly, said to me "how come you don't just do it right the first time?" I repositioned, lazily chewing on the idea and spitting out an unfinished thought like, "I dunno, I know where my things are in the mess and it's easier to just throw them somewhere than have a place for everything." I positioned myself perfectly for a rhetorical punisher move on my button-masher's argument, and had my lights subsequently knocked out by his response of "it'd be even easier if there wasn't a mess in the first place!"
In being humbled (and deciding that yeah, having a mess to look at and wallow in every day was probably also terrible for my mental health), I tried to stay on top of things. Forcing myself to have neat little places for everything was torture for my scattered artist's brain. My whole family was the same way too; for example, my mother's art studio was a hurricane of half-finished projects, drafts, paint tubes, palettes, documents, calendars, mailing supplies, framing tools, and so many pencils, yet she always knew where the exact tube of Prussian Blue she needed was. That's an explanation for my bad behavior, sure, I could blame it on my family, but that won't fix anything. I'm the one doing it now and I have to take responsibility for my (and my fiance's) dissatisfaction with this thing I have and do.
I'm no disciple of Marie Kondo, but I am boggled at how much stuff can accumulate if it's not given constant and immediate attention. No number of storage units I've helped clean, no amount of rooms I've decluttered for others, could prepare me for my own crap. The weird thing is that I don't mind cleaning and tidying up for other people, but I have to drag myself kicking and screaming into the kitchen just to wash the wooden utensils in the sink. Right now, as I'm writing this, my eyes occasionally drift down at a little storage organizer with clear drawers staring back at me, and I quickly refocus on the paragraph I'm writing like it's a better thing to do than spending five minutes digging through old cables.
I've got so many of these half-finished and mind-numbing organizational tasks on the backburner. I need to finish making pages for my portfolio on this very website, I need to reorganizing my legal documents, I need to clean out my purse. So many things I know wouldn't really take that long and would be even less effort, and yet I put them off again and again. Every time I throw another document lazily into the back of a binder can be considered a failure of my person.
I'm certain the many people in my life who tell me that I'm overcritical of myself is wholly unrelated to the topic of this post (author's note: this is a joke that's only funny to me). But how could I not be critical of my own behavior when I now look at my old portable hard drive and see "BP\Old_Files\Junk\scans-2015609T232321Z-001-20180129YU904516Z-001-20170317T074631Z-001.zip?"
The crucible of today's blog post was me remembering yesterday that I had some old MP3's I could salvage off of an old hard drive that should've had every file from the past two laptops on it. I was not ready to witness horrors as soon as I delved a single folder down. I'll never post shock content like that anywhere on the internet. A warzone scattered with a mix of corrupted JPGs, unlabeled PDFs, and piles upon piles of AVIFs strew about without thought or care. Lost art projects from high school were hidden behind homework I never finished and Powerpoint slides I never looked at. It was all hazy memory and garbage data. What monster could have done this? The mirror looked back at me and did not answer. I began to clean and re-label as penance for my crime.