Recluttering

Really, I wouldn't bother with this blog unless you're very desparate indeed to know how I got on with clearing out Mum's house as described in Extreme Decluttering. It's mainly here to help me justify my own plans to myself and contains far too much navel-gazing to be interesting.

Clearing out my parents' home has been somewhat like writing up my PhD. I don't mean to be grandiose about it, but that's the life experience which has most readily come to mind.

The other experience is the one I used to compare writing up the PhD to: climbing a mountain over a period of many months, during which I often wondered when I would see the other side.

With some discipline, it's possible to finish a PhD in psychology or social sciences in 3 years. First year: plan your research. Second year: collect data. Third year: Analyse and write it up. My wife did that. Like most of my friends who were doing PhDs at the same time, I took four. Partly this is because I collected too much data and spent most of my third year chasing it up blind alleys, or rather, getting lost on sheep tracks up the side of the mountain and wondering when I was going to get to the top.

Once I started writing productively, in the fourth year, it took four drafts to get it right. At the height of the second draft I had a spurt of writing over 20,000 words in ten days. It was about then that I started to feel I had got to the top of the mountain and could see the other side The first draft was sketchy, though good enough to present to my supervisor. The second draft gave it shape, and was good enough to ask for a second opinion. The third draft cut it down to a proper size by taking the worst bits out, and the fourth draft was just a minor refinement on the third. Looking back I felt I had been faffing around a lot before I got on in earnest with the first draft. As during my fourth PhD year, I didn't have a lot of time for a lot of distraction, and certainly not the time to blog on how I was getting on, as I thought I might have done.

I have been trying to clear out Mum's house for at least ten years, mostly while she was still living there. I made some earnest attempts at the beginning of that time, but much of the rest seems like faffing around - third-year PhD stuff. Even when I started in earnest at the beginning of this year I wasn't very effective, mainly moving things around rather than getting rid of them, despite inspiration from the Marie Kondo method. I did also spend the time preparing our house to cope, notably by getting the loft fully boarded that I had been meaning to board for the last several years. It took an intenstive effort from my more efficient sister and ruthless cousin (when I wasn't there) to dispose of stuff I wouldn't make decisions on. This felt like a proper end to the first draft: there was something to present, and the house was then presentable to potential viewers and went on the market.

Essentially we then left it for about four months when we did very little. We were reluctant to sort things out when we would have to clear them away again for prospective buyers; Mum needed help and took our attention away from the house; then she died and there were other consequences to deal with. I started on what felt like the second draft in August, and like my approach to the second draft it felt more systematic. I went through everything in the house and decided what I wanted to keep and what could go. Once I could concentrate on it properly in September I managed to rattle through it in weeks, as I had done at my most productive with my second draft. And again, this was the point when I began to see that I was getting to the top of the mountain and could start to see the way down.

The next stage was deciding how to dispose of the rest. My bottom line is that I can't stand just sending it to landfill. It feels hard just to throw away stuff that has been used and useful for years, even if it's in a bad state. It's like admitting that it's no use to anyone. Surely I am deluding myself and avoiding facing my own obsolescence, or something. Options included various charities, ebay, freecycle, recycling. But mostly it has gone in a few intensive bursts to places I hope it can be used. I moved most of the stuff I wanted to my house, two families needing furniture for their houses took a load each, and my cousin and sister returned to pack up stuff for charity shops & bric-a-brac stalls, and take them away. This just leaves a few things to clear up, like the tidying up of a conclusion. Mostly painless, with just a few feelings of it being hard to let go. But then I had spent a lot of time deciding what I really wanted to keep, and not being very ruthless about what I was willing to let go.

The final draft should be the final clearance and clean of the house, which now seems weeks away. Thesis completed, mountain climbed, job done.

Only that's not the end.

Because I have taken so much stuff from Mum's, and her sister's before then, that our house is now full of it. Oh, in some tidier ways than before, but still needing more tidying, organising, sorting through and disposing of. Leading me to wonder whether I really have got to the top of the mountain, or if it's just one of the foothills. Or is it more like the reality of a PhD, which is that it's just a start as far as the material it contains goes? The next stage is the equivalent of writing up papers for publication. Which I never did very much of. Despite many plans and many (I thought) publishable parts of it, less than a quarter of it ever got into a published form.

This is because I went on from it to train as a clinical psychologist instead of working in academia where I could write it up: a choice I certainly do not regret, but which meant any writing was a part-time hobby. After four years of not having published I chose to gave up trying so it would not keep looming over my life.

Did I not really do the job properly at all this year? Did I not discipline myself to dispose of stuff? Well, I did allow a great deal of it to go, including some I regretted, but most of which I didn't: books, papers, china, kitchen equipment, furniture. I also took a lot it to our house, and filled it in places that such that once open light-filled rooms now look more like a library stack. I don't want to keep all this stuff, but I saw it needed more time and attention than I could give it in clearing Mum's house.

I have had a life on hold for ten years. A ridiculous thing to say, as life has also been going on. But it's been about looking back, looking after my mother, and contemplation of disposing of family artefacts, not a life of looking forward to what I and my wife and son are going to do for ourselves now and in the future. This has to stop. I have to put this behind me. People want to know when I am going to get back to proper work. I could go back to it and abandon further sorting, as I abandoned writing up my PhD, and slowly throw out the material connected with it. What am I talking about? Some of the sorting undone includes PhD material I haven't yet disposed of. It would still be possible to try and write it up if I had to.

No: this time I have to do a more complete job. Which isn't equivalent to writing up every last paper I could have written from the material, but is about dealing with it and getting it out of a dominant position in my life. That's more like an exercise I did soon after getting married, of going back to my parents' house and sorting through all my stuff there, and disposing of many things until all that I took with me would fit into our small terraced first house. There are things I regret getting rid of now, but at least I did not hang onto them all. I need to do the same job with all the family artefacts I have collected, and I need to do it before I get back into full-time work. It feels like my family failed to do this and passed it on to me, though surely there must have been some things they did sort out before passing stuff on, and certainly there is much that my aunt has disposed of in her lifetime. I tell myself I owe it to my son not to pass it all on to him. I may be kidding myself, as I'm not sure he's that bothered to keep it all. But even if it's just for me, I have more to do here.

I said last year I would give it a year. Well, I have cleared out Mum's house in that year, which is more than I'd done in the previous ten. Can I not give it one more year to sort through what remains at my house? To get it into an organised form so everything has its place, and to dispose of the things which don't "spark joy", or at least which I don't need, not to keep things just in case.

I'm not sure whether it's a fourth draft or the publication stage, neither of which I completed before, or even whether it's still as if I haven't really got properly started on the second draft. But I did learn that PhDs (and possibly any writing project) are not usually completed: they're only abandoned at the point at which the author thinks it's good enough or fed up of making changes.

My prayer for myself in 2017 is that I will be able to know, before the end of the year, when I have done a good enough job of sorting.

Update December 2017. Find out what happened.

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