It has been said of creative people, there are no such things as messes, only brilliant ideas lying around everywhere. That has certainly always been the case with my creative brain. Mind you, the term creative brain does not correlate with other words like successful or heralded. We creatives understand this all too well. Watch any episode of Hoarders and you will see how our minds work. There is such beauty and magic in re-seeing what a thing can be. Once you break the chains of the 2nd dimension, nothing is as it seems. Those puzzles missing pieces were obviously destined to be decoratively lined, in modus Picasso, with Sharpie markers, then fashioned into 80s era earrings. Those empty paper towel and toilet paper cylinders can be drizzled with hot glue and spray painted. Once we add the batteryoperated tea lights that are around here somewhere, they’ll be amazing ghoulish Halloween window lights. Torn books make excellent decoupage material. What if a child knocks on the front door holding a Barbie missing one pink 1950s era plastic pump shoe and I have to tell her I was made to throw its mate away? We see the unseeable. We just don’t know where we put it. But, please don’t tell us it isn’t important. Creative people can be many things, including stubborn and yes, a bit messy. Don’t we try, though.
A few years back, I was having grave difficulty keeping it all together: my work schedule, my husband’s schedule, my aging parent’s doctor appointments, my grandchildren’s can’t miss moments, veterinary visits. “I think I need a calendar,” I said out loud one day. “No,” my husband responded. “You need to use your phone.” What a disaster. Day after day, I sat alarms, typed in day info, programmed reminders – all duds. The hubs proclaimed the issue to be human error, so he took over all the techie nightmares that made my head spin. Foiled again. I was sweetly accused of “accidentally” undoing his hours of thumb typing. How else could the phone have again failed me after the expert set everything up? Next, he decided the issue was my phone content, as if it’s not okay to have 15,000 pictures on a phone. “But, you don’t even clear your texts out every night,” he shouted in horror. “CLEAR MY TEXTS OUT,” I screeched. “What if I need to go back 5 years and reference a conversation to prove something wasn’t my fault? What if I need directions to that weird VA hospital auxiliary building we took Dad to 3 years ago? What about that hot toddy recipe from my Great Aunt Opal that my second cousin sent me in 2010? Delete those things?” Steam floated from his ears. We came to the conclusion that my body’s own chemical makeup is akin to a technical Bermuda Triangle where electric currents run backwards and pre-ancestral circadian rhythms can undo even the brilliance of Steve Jobs. Timers can’t time me. Alarms don’t alarm me. Maybe I am destined to use a paper calendar. However, the electronic disaster gave way to an epic paper puzzle of unsolvable mysteries. I hated the colorful gel pens. I only write with medium nibbed blue ink pens. I found the stickers monotonous. I abhorred the washi tape and the rubber stamps and the cutesy perforated grocery lists. Besides, why are there separate pages for each day? Do they really expect you to write in duplicate? If I note a baby shower one month at 2 on a Saturday, do I really need to find the other page for just the Saturday and write the same thing but bigger? Worst was the realization that, unless I studied that calendar like Vivien Leigh memorizing Tennessee Williams, it would’t make a difference in my organization at all. I was still lost.
Recently, perhaps as a part of a mid-life crisis of sorts, I picked up the torch of minimalism. Laugh all you want. My favorite color may be rust, and I may pledge allegiance to glitter and fringe, but there comes a day when you wake up and realize you cannot be who you want to be because you’ve created for yourself nothing more than the role of stuff manager. People who want to write don’t manage the collections of other people’s writings. Those who want to be artists cannot spend their days managing piles of never used paints. Thread rots. Glue dries in tubes. Do is an action verb. Sometimes, the distractions are like leaves that prevent the sun from shining on the tree’s roots. So, I organized, and eliminated, and donated, and reevaluated. I bid adieu to 80s era yards of elastic. I let go of my primary colored ribbon collection. I even reorganized my clothes, keeping only the things I felt represented where I intended to go instead of where I might’ve been. “Look at me,” I mused, doing the Marie Kondo fold on every garment I owned. This weekend, I found a long forgotten plastic storage bin on a longer forgotten closet shelf. Popping the lid off, I smelled my childhood: my mother’s Norell perfume and long Salem Light cigarettes. Fishing through the contents, I pulled out a Mattel 1957 Barbie doll with molded plastic hair and a magenta paisley patterned shirt dress, my first hand-me-down doll. She was missing one plastic shoe. My brain will never recover. God bless the hoarders.
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