It is exhausting running around circles and accomplishing nothing when shit gets real.
Recently moved from my little apartment to a house. I started out organizing and writing the contents of each box on the top. Very quickly I found myself just throwing random shit into boxes because I was taking too long. My landlord suggested the move because I have 4 kids and I needed more space. He was nice enough to put me in a much bigger place for only 20% more than I was paying.
I was already exhausted when I decided I needed to take my old toilet seat, which has two seats, a little one for little butts, and then lift that for the regular one for regular sized butts. I removed it from the toilet, put the small bits in a ziplock bag, and drove directly to the house. I walked a straight line from the car to the bathroom, took off the other seat, and then I couldn’t find the little square parts that mounted the screws. I didn’t have much backtracking to do. Walked back to the car, couldn’t find them. Searched from the entryway to the bathroom, nowhere to be found. Carefully checked the ground around the sidewalk. Nothing. Drove back to the apartment, nothing. I managed to keep my temper, but I was ready to blow my brains out on the emotional end of things.
After losing 2 hours searching frantically for the parts, I went back in to put the other seat back on and give up. There they were, just laying there beside the toilet in a spot I had checked a thousand fucking times.
And then guess what? Fucking lost the screws to the other seat and repeated the whole goddamn ordeal. Wanna guess where they were? In the SAME FUCKING SPOT as the other pieces I had lost.
I’m so fed up. My doctor won’t treat me because he’s old school and because I have a history of drug abuse (which is how he came to be my doctor in the first place). I can’t move to a new one because I don’t have the time to establish myself in the program. When you start a drug treatment program you begin by going daily, then weekly, then biweekly, and then finally, monthly. They all require you to do AA/NA/CR. It took me years to get out of all of that crap and I do not have the time to do it with all of these kids. I hate going to group, and after enough time passes with no failed drug tests you can get out of it. I haven’t been in 5 years. I don’t want to go now.
I’m going to beg my doctor at my next visit. I am exhausted living like this. I’m tired of being a burden to everyone around me because I can’t hold focus on anything for a minute. Entire days go by and I’m just in some void without even realizing it.
I just had to get it off my chest. I’d give anything to be like the people around me.
workarounds is the name of the game, you can usually make things significantly better with effort but the effort has to specifically go into finding solutions, into creative problem solving.
You can’t magic away a missing foot but you can very much make a prosthetic which makes life easier.
Trying to put effort into things like “just remembering” is entirely wasted effort IMO, and will just make people feel exhausted and frustrated.
Yup!
My workarounds are:
Keep things to a small enough number that I don’t lose something in the mess. That generally means single digit numbers of things near each other. Exceptions apply for things I am really, really interested in!
The best way to remember something is to put it between me and where I’m going, but only if it is the ONLY thing. So I can put something on the steps to the garage to remind myself to take it, but if my wife puts something there the system fails. I can put an object in front of a door, or on top of something I need, but it has to be interacted with in some way.
If I start to do something that involves going through a doorway or a place out of sight there is no stopping for interruptions. After a decade of consistency on part my wife finally waits for me to finish doing something when I say “not yet” as that is pretty much all I can get out without losing track of the things I’m doing that I don’t care about but needs to be done.
Knowing what I will forget and acknowledging it out loud has been partially successful with people’s understanding. No, adding something extra won’t help me remember names, it is just going to take enough repetition for it to stick and I’ll still say it wrong occasionally. Doesn’t mean I don’t care!
This is what I need to do. When I started moving I said to myself, “I need to throw things away that I don’t need. I need to give things away or sell what I have too many of.
There is no reason I should be sitting on 15 Sega Genesis consoles and 50 controllers. 10 half broken NES consoles that I have in pieces.
I’m never going to fix them. It isn’t going to happen.
The new house has an attic, and I was so excited to have space to put things out of my wife’s way. Climbed up there to discover it’s probably asbestos insulation. Now I have to get up there and get some to send off for testing. So frustrating. I can’t afford a pro. I can’t afford proper equipment. I’m getting a mask, some gloves, some goggles, and soapy water.
I worked in asbestos in my teens and 20s and I’m pretty sure I have issues because of it now. I’m going to VERY carefully collect a small sample and I really hope it isn’t the bad stuff.
If it’s clean and clear, my life will improve immensely. If it isn’t, I’ll never disturb it or go near the attic again.
I have a million screws, and I know when I throw them away I’ll find a use for one and they’ll all be gone. I finally made myself throw away old computer parts. Don’t even know why I kept some of them. Who needs an old ISA sound card that no one is interested in that probably won’t work anyway?
So I just deleted a wall of text and will restart with a concise rewording as an example of avoiding having too much!
Keeping things involves a combination of taking up space, a time and effort cost to keep clean and to move around, and a possible monetary cost in some cases. While judging that cost isn’t an exact science, the core idea is that inexpensive stuff that you don’t interact with regularly costs a lot more to keep around than to replace if you need it in the future. Heck, some expensive stuff that takes up space isn’t worth keeping around either, but the hard part is making a decision to let some things go and cheap and cumbersome is the best to start with!
I share your love of keeping screws. In fact, I tend to keep the ones from prebuilt stuff or from things I enjoy taking apart and those are things where keeping a reasonable amount is not a bad thing IF you can keep them easily organized. I have a ton of them, but since I sort them as I go they don’t really add any extra effort over throwing them away.
Computer parts are similar, but larger! I have four or five motherboards from past computer builds that I should get rid of but keep thinking I will build into linux boxes but haven’t gotten around to it because there isn’t an end goal past doing it. But I have taken baby steps to limit myself to one tub of excess computer parts and successfully threw away all the duplicate cabling and stuff that is not needed because that stuff was only needed a few times and looking back I could have replaced them for a few bucks.
Well, at least the wall is shorter and I will leave you with a recommendation to NOT put anything in storage in the attic. Choose to reduce instead, because it is easy to forget anything you put up there, it is often a pain in the ass to get in and out, and it will get so dusty over time. Cleaning that forgotten stuff when moving after a few years or more is absolutely horrible!
I’m so glad you said this to me. This is exactly what I needed. The thought of that dust has me making different considerations all the way around.
If I put something in the attic, it’s going to be in a sealed bag. It’s going to be something that means a lot to me, not shit that I will never touch.
I want to make it so that I fill these two little plastic drawers with the things that I want and I want everything else to go away.
My wife is a beautiful, amazing, spectacular human being, who deserves to have space that she can be comfortable and happy in. I just need to get over myself and throw this shit away.