Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Noise

I hate clutter. It bothers me to the point of distraction. I call it visual noise. This is why I sleep so much better when my house is tidy. My sleep, after I do my dishes and clean my kitchen, the oft ignored room during my tidy regiment, is a beautiful thing. I know I'm not alone in this. However, my need for clutter free spaces generally applies only to spaces I can see. My counter may be clear, but please don't look in my cupboards. Sadly, one of the deterrents from cleaning out my cupboards to set them straight is that I'd have to make the spaces I can see a mess before the inside cupboards are orderly. I just don't want to endure the visual noise of it all.

Another place that my clutter rule does not apply is my mind.

My mind is always running. Often, it takes a detour into Crazytown(What was that noise? I think I'm about to robbed. And murdered. Ah man, my place is a mess-the CSI guys are going to think I'm a slob!), but mostly it's just running with white noise. Things I have to get done, major life decision, that boy I liked in Grade 3*, how much soup I still have in my freezer, that email I have to sent, the time I got a perm, that other email I have to send, the dishes that have been sitting in the sink for far too long, that fictional character I care too much about, that other major life decision. It's endless.

This fact has not helped my writing. It has not gone unnoticed by me that I haven't written a thing since October. That's a far cry from my 'every two weeks' goal from July. I have things I want to write about on a weekly basis. Some things often come back to me repeatedly. For example, I wrote the title of this post in November. I've been thinking about the nuthouse that is my mind, since November, if not before. However, the other clutter that occupies my mind gets in the way of writing the posts I want to.

I was talking with a friend a couple weeks ago about insomnia, something we both struggle with, and she commented that it sometimes stems from stressors in her life. Not big news, but it made me think about my life and the stressors that may be keeping me up. The clutter makes it difficult to identify the things that are really bothering me. On occasion, when I do identify a stressor, it's just simpler, but certainly not healthier, to leave it in among the clutter. Like my cupboards, I'm afraid of the mess I might make trying to put the inside in order.


*His name was Cole. He wore a florescent green shirt and his house key around his neck. He had brown hair and was the handsomest boy I had ever seen.