Lately I find myself thinking a lot in terms of organisation, cleaning, prioritisation. I’m feeling a desire to simplify and organise my life, to build new systems, to find new approaches and try to start new habits.
Over the years, I’ve learnt to be wary of these urges. I know I get them relatively often, specially I used to get them a lot at the start of my school year. Every September, I would set out to start this year differently. I would buy new notebooks or new folders or try some new software. I would learn about new “productivity systems” and attempt to organise my life through them. Evernote, OneNote, Trello… whichever new app would feel new and clean and like just my vibe for the year. And then, after 2-3 months I would have probably dropped the system or at least stopped using it fully - I’ve seen many ADHD memes referencing this.
Coincidentally, we’re in September now. Who knows, maybe this periodic urge has become ingrained in my psyche in some way, even if I don’t go to school or uni anymore. Or maybe, this is my response to the depression I’ve been feeling lately. Maybe this is part of the “settling down” vibe that I’ve been talking about with my partner.
I don’t know. On the one hand, I’ve gotten so used to distrust this way of thinking over past few years. After all, by now it’s clear that anything I set up, any systems I adapt, don’t last very much. They all end up failing, and I think I understand why. They all come from a need for control, a top-down ambition, mostly ego driven, that has decided what I should do, how I should act and who I should be, and then made that into my desire. And that’s why they fail. Because, in the long run, top-down ego driven should’s end up falling apart. As visakanv would say, “you can’t win against the ADHD militias in your brain”. I don’t know if I have ADHD, but I know that as long as there is a part of me deciding what I should do and trying to make it happen, there is bound to be other parts of me rebelling against it, and in the end the latter ones tend to win.
I’ve been trying to learn to drive myself in a different way. I firmly believe that there exists a path towards integration, towards the different parts of me reaching some compromise and escaping any false dichotomies. Even if I can’t find this compromise all the time, at least to be able to recognise the supposed conflicts and reframe them as opportunities for balance.
And yet, now that I’m feeling this urge to tidy up and organise, I can’t help but be compelled and consider that, maybe, there is nothing wrong with some tidying up every once in a while. As powerful and true as bottom-up designs are, maybe some balance is precisely what is needed here. Maybe it makes sense to have some periods where everything falls down under the weight of my own wilderness, and other periods where I want to find some order in the chaos that has emerged.
A while ago, I thought about how I wanted to watch Marie Kondo’s show. Since I was a kid I’ve always dreaded tidying up my room, and specially when that meant throwing away my stuff. Meanwhile, my dad, would periodically want to clean up the house (huh sounds familiar), and make us decide which of our things would we throw away, usually under the threat that if we didn’t decide he would make the choice for us. This happened again this summer, when I came to visit back home. I didn’t fight it much, because I understood where he was coming from. I understood at some level he was right: we can’t keep everything forever, and we need to move on and let go if we want to go forward. So I tried to take it the way I imagine Marie Kondo would take it: instead of as a chore, take it as an opportunity to decide what’s important for you, to prioritise.
I believe that’s what this period and this urge of organisation should be about. It’s only normal, seeing my past experience with tidying up and my own internal rebellion against organisation, that I’m distrustful of any top-down attempts to introduce some level of order. The concept of “top-down” itself feels icky, uncomfortable, and even a bit dirty. It brings back a feeling of rigidity and judgement. However, maybe this is only due to the coercion with which I have approached, or been approached, this topic previously in life. Maybe I can find the part within me that is seeking out this organisation, and maybe if I have enough patience to understand any other desires that may come up in the process, I can frame this urge less as an imposition of a certain ambition or a repression of other desires, and more as an opportunity to catch up with myself, pay attention and assess all my current desires to make a plan of action that honours them.