So my therapist has been helping me get to grips with my ADHD, and also the concept that I’m not shit at being an adult, I just can’t do things the way everyone has always told me to do them. Like every single “organize your life” books have always left me wanting to cry with frustration, and after I got hold of a copy of Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD by Susan Pinsky I realized that was because they primarily focus on “aesthetic” over “function”. And the function of most standard “organize your life books” is to “make things look Show Home Perfect”.
So the standard “hide all your unsightly things by doing xyz” may look nice for the first week or so, but by the end of the week it’ll look like a tornado made of pure inhuman frustration ripped through the house as I try to find the fucking advil.
To give you an example of the kind of hell I’ve been fumbling my way through the last 20 odd years: dishes will be washed and left in the drying wrack but never put away. Which means I can’t wash more dishes, which means dishes pile up, which means I can’t make food, which means I don’t eat, which means my CFS gets worse, which means I don’t have the energy to put the dishes away, and so on so forth until I have a meltdown, cry to ETD (who also likely has ADHD but has never had it confirmed) about how I can’t cope with life, and then we fix it for a while, but inevitably end up back at square one within about a week.
Pinsky’s solution to this was “remove an obstacle between you and your goal, if that means taking all the doors off your kitchen cabinets to make things easier, so be it.”
And lemme tell you, fucking revolutionary.
Laundry never ends up in the hamper??? why???? is it a closed hamper??? Remove the lid. Throw it out the window. Clothes are now miraculously finding their way into the hamper??? Rejoice????
Mail ends up spread out over every available flat surface? Put a sorting station right where your mail arrives. Put a shredder or “junk” basket under it. Shred or dump the junk immediately. Realize you only actually have two real letters that need attention, feel less overwhelmed, pay your bills on time.
Like I’m not saying this book is miraculous, but it did help me realize that I was effectively torturing myself by trying to conform to certain ideals of “perfect house keeping”, and presenting a certain image rather than just allowing myself to live in my space as effectively as possible. And why? Why was I doing that? Cause people with different lives and capabilities are perceived as the norm? Fuck that. If this was a physical problem I wouldn’t be forcing myself to conform to an ableist standard, so why am I doing it with this?
My lived space will never look a certain way, and that’s okay. It will never look show home perfect, and that’s okay. It will likely always be cluttered and eclectic where nothing matches, and that’s okay. Sometimes I will have odd socks on because sorting them out required too much mental energy, and that’s okay. Actually fuck sorting socks, just buy all your socks in the same color. Problem solved. Boring sure, but also one less thing to do, which means more time to hyper fixate on fun things. Which really, what else is my life for if not to write screeds and screeds of vampire shit posts, I ask you.
Additional rec: If y'all are having trouble w organization, you might find clutterbug on YouTube helpful. She’s one of those mom youtubers whose entire channel is dedicated to cleaning and organizing (one of my fave genres of YouTube videos) and she has a quiz on her website you can take that tells you the kind of “bug” you are and the organization styles associated with each one. P sure she has adhd herself and talks about it in some of her vids, but I think definitely anyone struggling with organization can learn something from her. She’s recommended the taking doors off of things and other helpful tips.
She talks a lot about systems that work for different people n how much visual clutter they prefer and whether they’re better suited to micro-organization or macro-organization and I think it’s been helpful for me to understand myself better (and sometimes you can have one style for certain parts of your life and another style for different parts which seems obvious but was helpful for me to understand). She talks a lot also about how everyone in her family has different styles and how she manages them and I think that could be beneficial too for people who don’t live alone and may get frustrated with one another in that department.
Because of this post I got rid of my dresser and lined my closet with laundry baskets. Now I can put away laundry merely by sorting it and tossing it into the designated basket––it cuts out several steps and instead of half an hour or more to put away one load of laundry, it now takes three minutes. I no longer have several piles of clean laundry around my room.
