Ever opened a drawer – the junk drawer or any drawer where you don’t have a system to speak of? How long does it take to find what you seek?
Depends on the size of the drawer, the contents, how often you use it to dump things in I suppose.
My mind has felt like that drawer at times – where I’ve continued to dump materials over the years in every which category without any specific line of reasoning or objectives. I’ve allowed life to ‘float’ me from one situation to another, in work, in relationships, in my own exploration of self, the universe and everything.
I have enjoyed some aspects of this haphazard ‘storage’ and ‘exploration’ system. It’s allowed me to work in media, in development, in non-profits, with public agencies and private firms alike in everything from business to education to human rights to finance. It’s been fun, it’s been enlightening, but ultimately I found myself wondering: What next.
The drawer was stuck – bogged down with an increasing feeling of existential dread that seemed to invoke ideas of ‘whats ifs,’ ‘should have’ ‘could have’ ‘would have’ and ‘if only,’ that spanned the length and width of its contents. As I struggled to recover from my second stroke in 2023 (yes, second!) these thoughts became even more profound, even more consistent.
Ultimately the question of ‘What Next’ emerged unbidden and at every turn my life took (big or small). It was then that with each attempt to ‘unstuck’ that drawer the answer became clearer.
This is my answer: The Next is to empty that drawer, go ‘minimalist’ in my thinking or channel Marie Kondo and ask “Does this bring me joy?”
As I take out memories, experiences, relationships, possessions, I review each. To select the things I would put back, I reflect on how each adds value to my life.
Memories, especially the traumatic ones are the heaviest items, the most ‘sticky’ elements. They’re like those half-scratched stickers of our favorite cartoon characters that we couldn’t put in notebooks but stuck on furniture in our naivety. Try as you might, they won’t unstick, they’ll leave residue and perhaps that is how it should be.
The change from flutter shy to rainbow dash in my personality perhaps needs to be reflected in half-faded, half-peeled stickers once vibrant, now a dull consideration. Going from Barbie to transformers, from Courage the Cowardly Dog to Bill and Mandy, or Fairy Tale to Berserk – these stickers represent a reality of charming travels across my country as an adolescent with my grandmother to sitting next to a hospital bed watching my father fade and every moment since – all of them evolving the stickers I choose, the traits I’ve developed. The marks of memories, the grief or joy attached to each, the trauma born of others in between have added a ‘weight’ to my personality that was necessary. As these stickers do.
In relationships, some items / analogies of my connections to this world I cannot choose to throw away – like family members, they must remain regardless of how much we clash or disagree. They are immovable features in the drawer that is my mind. Others, like ‘work relations’ I evaluate through the lens of value and find many have been adding a darkness to my personality, each adding a little spot of ink where once there was light. Those blots expanding, coloring the drawer black and blue with pens of interpersonal politics, negativity and their own insecurities fermenting into the flammable values of gaslighting or love bombing and everything in between.
Then again there are the friendships we all crave – we want to be known, to be acknowledged, to be validated. In evaluation of each, I find many were not ‘true’ to me. They would be friendly, complimentary, congenial in our interactions but false friends in reality. These are the ones that are nowhere to be found in times of need. Then there are those that you MUST value, those that have given me reason to trust myself, to trust in my abilities, to trust in them in a million different ways.
Finally, I come to the ever-mutable element of ‘work.’ Did my work bring me joy or push me deeper into those questions that set me on this quest to begin with? As I started experimenting with work opportunities, the ones I’d had in the past and the ones in the present, I began to discover more hidden elements within myself. There were the skills that seemed to be common every object, of playfulness, of curiosity, of creativity, of a veritable rainbow of values that I could add to whatever path I chose. The work represented the knick knacks, the spinners, the slinkies, the puzzles, that may seem different, disconnected, even at times abhorrent and ugly, but put together formed the perfect aesthetic to what I could become.
The world, the drawer, my heart, my mind, they are not monochrome, but shades of grey, with the ink that has tarnished me somehow lightened with the brightness of positive experiences I’ve had. It is this combination of both dark and light factors that has brought me to this stage, this ‘cleansing.’
Armed with more self-awareness than ever before in my life, armed with a new zest for life after having brushed close to the idea of its end, I pull out the drawer, I empty it. I rebuild.
So what brings me joy?
It is the smell of earth after rain, a cup of khoka chai with a friend, the stillness in spending hours into the night talking with someone you connect to, the thrill of achievement after hiking a trail, the sense of calm after a great meditation session, even helping someone find their purpose after a counseling session. The list goes on and it isn’t limited to any one thing or category.
In the last few months, I’ve set myself on a course to discover even more of myself.
To the drawer I can now add both the old (cat, family, books, etc) and the new (Reiki, yoga, meditation) alongside some necessities (creative writing, spirit, philosophy, logic, nutrition, exercise, travel) – as I said, the list is endless.
The drawer sits empty now, not because I don’t know what to put in it, but because I carry so much potential within the piles and categories I’ve developed that is worth the keep.
As I continue to write, continue to explore, continue to connect with you, dear reader – I’ll refill this drawer with the elements that bring me the most joy whilst discussing the logic behind each discard.
Are you ready to open your own drawers, to question your own joys, to unstuck your life with me?