Healthy Junk
A nod to hanging onto stuff for a while.
I wager to say we all have junk drawers.
You know, that drawer somewhere in the house where random items are thrown. Dwelling within are keys to long-forgotten locks, pens that ran out of ink, buttons from garments we no longer wear, batteries that may or may not work, thread, foreign currency (in case we ever go back), ticket stubs, and spent gift cards.
And then there are the will-use-it-for-sure items like scissors, tape, string, paper clips and loose staples. Oh! And several calculators lurk between them, you know, in case we ever lose our smart phone, iPad, lap top, chrome book and apple watch that we currently use to calculate our numbers.
Most of us have several categories of junk drawers around the house. There is the aforementioned one I like to call “The Bits and Bites” drawer. There is the pharmaceutical drawer, with three kinds of painkiller bottles housing 1-3 pills each. It also propagates every old prescription you ever had in case you fall prey to the same ailment again. Often it contains several vitamins and supplements you thought would prevent said ailments from returning to haunt. Usually there is a random bandaid or two, and loose pills line the corners of the drawer. You kept them because they were important and you didn’t have enough room for more bottles. So important that you forget what they were for.
Women have their make-up junk drawer or cosmetic bag where wayward beauty products wander. You know, the lip colour purchased at Shoppers Drug Mart that was meant to restore the look of your natural beauty but transforms you into looking like the Witch of Eastwick once applied. We all understand that these rejects should not be discarded. One day our complexion might magically change and we will regret not having that lipstick shade.
It’s not just women who can’t part with our beauty tools. I have witnessed men squirrelling away nails, screws, bits, batteries, and glue. Oh, they try and fool us by placing them in saved tin cans, labelling them and sorting them in categories but nonetheless, they ain’t going to use that old rusty nail again. And what about their wood collections? They save every two inch, eight inch, whatever-inch leftover piece of 2 by 4 and 4 by 8 to fall to the cutting room floor. They might need them for the next project, right?
I bet I could go around every room of the house and find a form of a junk drawer somewhere. I think they are born when straightening up in a hurry before the relatives arrive. Out of sight, eventually out of mind.
Recently, I read an article instructing how to tackle the arduous task of cleaning out your junk drawer. It had lots of advice on how to do this without becoming overwhelmed and without being left with a sense of loss from the tossing of those beloved perpetually potential useful objects. The author explained that it was an exhilarating experience to dive into the junk drawer.
Except that I don’t want to.
While reading the platitudes of cleaning out junk, I was struck with the idea that the process is similar to my experience with unwanted emotions. To others, I appear even-keeled and for the most part I am. It’s because I have not released and let go of certain unpleasant emotions. As a result, I hardly ever express my anger. I shove it down until it fossilizes. Unfortunately, an unexpected event or person occasionally serves as the archaeologist who digs up the anger-fosil and when it is exposed to oxygen again, like fire, it flames up. A wise friend once told me that anger is a fire that must be expressed and burned until it’s out. Otherwise, ambers can be inflamed. This was freeing for me. I am actually allowed to be angry once in a while. Expressed wisely, it can be removed from my emotional junk drawer.
Grief is another one I have fossilized in my mind’s junk drawer. Sometimes it has been grief caused by the death of a loved one and, other times, it’s grief when a relationship ends. This morning I found myself bawling, missing my mother who died seven months ago. I don’t cry very often and was surprised with this outburst. I was disappointed with myself because I thought I was doing well with the grieving process. After marinating in tears for a bit, I realized that I was actually moving along the grieving process in a healthy way. This was part of it and I was pulling it out of my mind’s junk drawer and dealing with it.
I think many emotions have to percolate in a junk drawer for a while, as long as we remember they are there. Every once and awhile, we have to examine them more deeply with the aim to get to the spot where we can remove them from the drawer. This is resiliency, I think. Bouncing back, in and out of the junk. I used to have the notion that as I became more resilient, I would feel less and less unwanted emotion and move in and out of circumstances with ease and joy. Unlike my original concept of resilience, I have come to acknowledge that resilience is a form of course correcting. And you can’t correct until you feel off kilter.
In the end, I will take the declutter advice from the junk-drawer guru but I do not subscribe to getting rid of it entirely. It serves a health purpose. My mind’s junk clean up was a success today.
And the advice columnist was right. It is an exhilarating experience.
