Last week I was talking to someone who asked me why I was so overwhelmed all the time. I went into a long monologue WITH HAND GESTURES, about having too much stuff, about a house overflowing, about feeling like I couldn’t keep anything simplified or ordered because there was just so much house to take care of that by the time I got done with one small task, three more had sprung up to take its place. 

She looked at me and said something like, “Do you ever wonder if there’s a deeper reason you aren’t getting things done? Like maybe you’re afraid of what it would look like to have nothing in your way?” 

BAHHH. NO. Of course there wasn’t a deeper reason, and stop minimizing my struggles, thank you very much. Sheesh. 

Then I realized that the entire line of questioning was making me unbelievably uncomfortable; which meant she’d hit on something I should probably look at. It’s good that I can have this understanding of myself, even if the reaction is sometimes, uh, delayed. 

So I started looking. Why do I have so many things to do? Why can’t I get them done? What’s stopping me? Asking myself questions has always been a great way of getting answers, and after a couple days I could feel myself noticing all the times I wasn’t present. I began to see how I spent a lot of time avoiding the feeling of being overwhelmed by avoiding the very tasks that would make me feel less overwhelmed. 

I sat with this, and apparently it triggered The Cleaning Lady: some inner goddess of domesticity that I had no idea resided within me. It started innocently enough; I spent an afternoon filling our van with cardboard from the garage, and then Sonja and I dropped it off at the recycling center. A day later, I inexplicably spent two and a half hours cleaning our fairly large master bathroom while my daughter swam in our bathtub pretending to be a mermaid named Celeria. I scrubbed, I shined, I organized, I dusted, I swept, I swiffered, and I offered advice to mermaids. At the end I was exhausted, pleased, and a little confused. What just happened? 

Today I did it again. I woke up and declared the kitchen as the next target. I pulled everything out of the pantry and two huge banks of cupboards, and I organized, tossed things out, dusted, scrubbed, swept, swiffered, filled a box to go to Goodwill, and then put everything back again in better order. I even created an entire cupboard for Sonja to put her kitchen stuff. 

So what does this have to do with food, you ask? Well, a couple things. 

The first is practical; it’s amazing what a clean and ordered kitchen does to the soul. After hours of work, when I should have wanted to sit down and put my feet up, instead I made a huge double+ batch of Natasha’s Almond Butter Balls and reveled in all the counter space, and how easily I could find all the ingredients I needed. 

The second is emotional; what this is really about is presence. I have a few dozen books that talk about mindfulness, but reading about awareness and actually taking a deep breath and looking around you are two very different things. Cleaning and organizing so much in the last few days has felt like me being present with my feelings, responding to them, taking care of myself. You might notice that I’m trying to do this exact same thing with food, too. 

Both are hard; it’s surprisingly hard to take care of oneself I think. I’m not sure if we’re all built this way, or what, but a lot of us seem to be conditioned to either not think we’re worth the effort, or (in my case) to feel this need for a drama that we can control, because maybe a lot of other things (like, oh, I don’t know, a severe anxiety disorder could fit here) makes us feel truly out of control.

Overeating, and acquiring so much stuff that it’s hard to keep a household running smoothly, are both interesting (in my opinion) problems of soothing with excess. Piling on layers of things to assuage anxiety. The piling is, paradoxically, a way we’re trying to care for ourselves, but obviously not a very good one in the long term. Anxious people tend to go for the short term reassurances over the long term as a general rule. I’m no different. 

Which is why the last few days of “life organizing” have been surprising. It’s a rejection of the idea that avoiding anything will do any good, it’s a break in habit of how I cope with things that scare me, and it’s an affirmation that my long term happiness and health is a priority to, well, me. 

I’m taking all this as good news.