Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Too Much Tidying

As part of my preparation for selling the flat I’m spending every evening tidying and sorting and clearing up, moving all extraneous matter and clutter out to the garage.

I’m hindered by the fact that I can’t make myself just sweep everything up into a big bag and bung that in the garage. Being a Monica-type-person, I have to sort everything into themed piles and stack each pile neatly into an appropriate box (after pondering for half an hour over which pile and then which box each item should go into). It takes me days just to sort through one small heap of stuff! The perils of having an over-organising brain!

Charles said recently that he thinks I spend my evenings reading celebrity magazines and watching TV. If only he knew! The sad fact is that what really fills up my evenings is cleaning, sorting, oranising, tidying, planning… I just can’t sit down until everything around the house is done (which it never is so I never sit down!). I think the reason I generally sleep so solidly is that I go to bed so flipping exhausted! On the odd occasion that I do decide to have an hour with a book before bed I can’t enjoy it because of the self-imposed guilt guilt guilt! You see, I have this rather stupid idea that, if I can just get to the point where all (and I mean ALL) the useful things are done and out of the way, then, and only then, can I allow myself to relax and do fun things with my evenings. But of course there is always something useful that could be done if I look hard enough.


I’m actually really looking forward to a year in a rented place with Charles. I will still have to get things like shopping and cleaning and laundry out of the way before I can allow myself to switch off, but there will be no need to paint a wall, or run up a pair of curtains, or shop for bookshelves, or tidy the garage… all that can wait until we buy somewhere of our own. Instead I am going to enjoy reading books and creating art. Hey, my life will be fun!

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