A long awaited tidy up.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been going through some of my belongings and finally having a clear out. For years, well in fact most of my life, I have been a bit of a hoarder. I have always been a person that says, “That could be useful one day”. I don’t know if it is because I never had too many belongings as a child or what that caused me to start keeping everything. I know I was always made to take good care of my belongings from an early age as there wasn’t a huge amount of money around and well that was more the way things were in those days. It wasn’t the throw away society we live in now. Belongings mattered and mine seemingly mattered to me more than most people.

Everywhere I have moved to my belongings have got increasingly worse. Moving to our current home we were effectively paying a removal firm to help shift rubbish. And what is worse is that most of this stuff just got put straight in the loft out of the way. Out of sight and out of mind. Well not exactly out of mind. It has constantly been bothering me. Nagging me to get it sorted but I never could. If for no other reason than it always felt like way to big a job and I never knew where to start with it. Especially as up to now I have never felt able to get rid of any of it.

But that has recently changed. One of the good things about my diagnosis of autism and especially my understanding of my Executive Dysfunction is that I am slowly starting to understand myself a little bit better. I can start to see why I haven’t been able to do things before, why I haven’t coped with things, why things have always been put off rather than dealt with in the way I envy other people doing. Somehow the knowing about my issues and starting to come to an understanding of them has given me the impetus I needed to move some things along. It is almost like I have been granted a fresh start and I want to take it.

I know from previous experience of the way I am that it may not last. Good stretches for me are rare and generally short-lived. I would normally have come crashing down with a deep low by now and although I know that might still happen I am more aware of the signs to spot early and hopefully take the right course of action like allowing myself to rest before it’s all too late. I have already needed to take it easy for a couple of days during this process but I have managed to get back to the job in hand which has never normally happened before.

So where have I got to? Well I have managed to clear through around twenty boxes and reduced them down to about a box and a half. What an achievement? And in the process of all that I have managed to relieve myself of a lot of mental baggage I have been carrying around for a long time. Things that have been dragging me down mentally. It is very freeing and I am glad I am doing it. It is still a work in progress and there will still be the massive bonfire to come as I permanently get rid of these things as a lot of them cannot for various reasons just be chucked in the bin or recycling.

I am trying to be proud of myself for doing it for once but that is constantly being overshadowed but me beating myself up for never having just got and done it before. But that is the whole point. I haven’t managed to do it before but I have done now so yes I am proud of myself. Well done me! Let’s just hope this really is the start of a new beginning of sorts. I could certainly do with it.