One of the many challenging things about living with me, for the few who’ve made the attempt, is that I am something of a packrat. Hoarder is the term of art these days, although in its true sense, this term implies something ominous, clinical, and possibly dangerous, dredging up images of people using stacks of every city newspaper since 1929 as furniture. But as these things go, hoarder has become defanged from overuse in the way that casual exaggeration creates new conduits in language: your ex is a psycho, you are starving before every meal, and everything you can imagine is literally happening right now.

My particular penchant for accumulation, which kind of confounds Marie Kondo’s spark joy inquiry, is papers, a product of many influences and interests but largely revolving around blurry distinctions between past and present, a love of history in all its forms, a personal autobiographical inclination to narrative, and the periodically renewed experience of being told that nothing was as I felt it was in the past (speaking of exes), which provokes a desire to keep the evidence, if only to reassure myself. All of these are related to my HSAM-adjacent memory and are better-said in the essay “Who Can Feel ‘Em Most,” which will someday hopefully be linked as a publication somewhere.

It’s worth noting that I’ve gotten better over the years. I have, in the past decade, deliberately and willingly recycled hundreds of pieces of paper. Possibly over a thousand. They’re still a small fraction of my lifetime paper accumulation/generation, but it’s a start. Many of these are in the category of the decidedly unsentimental: bills, receipts (although the right receipt can be sentimental), takeout menus, flyers for unattended events. In some cases, I have parted with duplicates of tickets or programs for attended events. Envelopes for important cards or letters. Financial notices and legal disclosures that I am finally fairly certain will no longer be crucial to find and cite at a later date.

But no matter how much better I get at the eventual discard, I maintain the stubborn habit of needing one room in my domicile where I am unconcerned about clutter. The clutter goes beyond an accumulation of papers that start by stacking in piles of various importance: immediate to-dos; important soon but not yet relevant; sentimental archive; necessary to keep for a year or so and then discard. Other objects that get piled and eventually disheveled include: books to read or just completed; clothes of all varieties and in all states; water cups that I tend to misuse like that girl in the movie “Signs;” other dishes; unopened snacks; wall decorations of all manner; especially sentimental artifacts which I would like to display but don’t yet know how (current most relevant examples: the foul ball I caught off the bat of J.P. Crawford and Graham’s “1st Visit!” button from Disney World); stuffed animals; hats; sports equipment; pens; candles; cash, both paper and coins; gift bags; and now also Graham’s toys.

Alex and I learned early in our relationship that things would go much better for both of us if I had a designated room that I could keep as a safe space to be a repository for these things to build up. In almost all the places we’ve lived, I’ve been lucky enough to have an “office,” usually billed as an extra bedroom by the landlord, where I can put my computer and desk and posters and books and let everything build up like this. Sometimes, in smaller places, we’ve tried to have only part of the office get this way so Alex could still access the desk as a workspace, but those idealized experiments have largely failed.

If this all sounds really overwhelming, it is:

Now as dysfunctional as all this may seem, it has always been punctuated by a periodic manic clean-up, top to bottom, to get everything into a state where even people who I have lived with would feel comfortable having company in the room. And I have my own heuristics for deciding that it’s time to schedule and execute such a whirlwind organization spree, though I do sometimes procrastinate beyond that threshold. These triggering guidelines are simple: either (a) I can’t find something important that I really need to find and know is in one of the piles and/or (b) I am more annoyed by how hard it is to walk among the piles without knocking them over than I am by the idea of doing a full-scale cleaning.

I’ve been overdue on both for a while, especially (b). But, y’know, it’s been a really bad summer in the midst of a bad year. Indeed, when I first concocted the idea for One Thing, one of my first thoughts would be that I would go home and clean my office, and that would be an extra incentive to just get it done already. Yesterday marked two weeks since I flew home, and I finally started the process. I used to pull an all-nighter to get these done, but looking around as I write this, I realize that age comes with detriments too, and I still have a ways to go, though I’m definitely over the exhausting initial hump. Vacuuming and some of the actual cleaning (as opposed to decluttering) will happen today. But I have my huge bag of trash, my densely packed bin of recycling, my stack of dishes, and have already carted out armfuls of laundry. I’m getting there.

Before I was renting apartments or buying houses, the only space I had for this boom-and-bust organizational cycle was my own room. My parents never let it get quite this bad under their roof, so it really hit the fan in college, and the cycle crystallized the first time I was living alone in my life, my junior year when I had a single on the sixth floor of Pomerantz in East Quad at Brandeis. I really adored that tiny room and have written about it often (not least of which was live, daily, when I was living there! – starting here). It had an east-facing window that woke me up at sunrise, through which I could witness a gorgeous ten-mile view of the Boston skyline. When I first moved in, I immediately took the screen off that window and the frame out from under my bed so I could create a little cubby-cave to sleep in, with the head under the built-in shelves and the sides framed by the wall on one side and the back of my desk on the other. I threw both in the closet and forgot about them entirely, to the point that Brandeis sent my parents a bill for both items until I explained to my dad, who explained to residential life, that they could find them in the closet where they’d been since the day I moved in.

I was way behind in my process on that move-out day, since it had been too long since my last manic clean-up and I hadn’t really lined up a place to store the things I couldn’t bring home. My years at Brandeis were marked by an annual panic at what to do with the fact that I had more stuff to keep than would fit on the plane home: a desktop computer primarily, but also posters, photographs, debate trophies, and all those newly generated papers. Summer storage was only offered to international students and I hadn’t the money to rent a space for only a box or two. The first year, my friend Stina’s family generously offered their attic, though this ultimately caused misunderstanding and ultimately I think some resentment. Going into the summer of 2001, I was out of options and had a very real plane about to depart, when I struck a deal with my good friend Brandzy, President of the Student Senate: he would store a box in the Student Senate office in exchange for my commitment to, after the statute of limitations on my non-registration for the Selective Service ran out, vote in every election I could. At the time, I was questioning the value of such civic participation, given the dearth of good options, but he felt strongly that voting was an absolute responsibility, though he understood my social contract arguments for holding out till my 26th birthday as a self-imposed penalty for civil disobedience.

Now, the rub was that my definition of “one box” was a bit disingenuous. Impervious to general packing and moving guidelines for sizing boxes by weight, I’d found a discarded industrial styrofoam-cup box that was about two-thirds of my height and stuffed it with all of the above items. To review: a desktop computer (with bulky pre-flatscreen monitor), almost countless debate trophies (including the infamous “sea urchin,” a stylized heavy metal-and-ceramic art piece that looked and hurt like a medieval mace, the prize for top speaker my sophomore year at Rhode Island College), all of my papers for the year, and a handful of books (though I had, thank God, stopped buying college textbooks a year earlier as a personal policy). Did I mention I was on the sixth floor of Pomerantz? And that there were no elevators in the building? And that the Student Senate office was in the Student Center, which was up a mammoth hill whose top was at eye-level with my sixth-floor room, then up a winding hill path the equivalent of about five more city blocks? And that at the last minute, I included transport of the box to the office into our deal? And, finally, that neither of us had a car on the east coast?

Yeah.

The box ultimately probably weighed a hundred pounds and was unwieldy as all hell, a bit like wrestling an upright but comatose human. While I’ve heard no end of well-deserved flak for this disgraceful request of my then-and-now good friend in the decades since, I’m still not quite sure how he did it in the late-May heat of a burgeoning Massachusetts summer. I imagine it involved a lot of shuffling the box along steps, asphalt, and cement by its bottom, because there’s simply no way the box could have been lifted. Probably the worst part of it is that, aside from the computer, most of the contents were not things I urgently needed the next year, so I actually left the box in the Senate office to get in people’s way for several months after the next academic year began. I think it was getting toward the end of the first semester when I finally retrieved it, loading it up in the car I’d taken to school that term for my off-campus apartment and (let’s face it, mostly) to drive to debate trips. In the months of neglect, someone had stolen the sea urchin and a pair of pretty nice hiking boots from the top layer of the sedimentary box, but I really can’t blame them.

In thinking about the roots of this pattern in my life, in why I continue to irreparably follow this boom-and-bust cycle despite its obvious drawbacks, all I can offer is that the mental load of organizing everything perfectly in the moment, as I go, feels so debilitating as to make life impossible. I often run into roadblocks like this when contemplating my life in contrast of the “normal” or what a lot of other people are doing. I think it is the nature of our brains that creativity requires a lot of space (ideally to the point of boredom) and that the more room that is displaced by daily routine and maintenance, the less room there is for the contemplation that leads to creation. Combine this with my habit of making myself adopt routines and maintenance only by making myself feel bad if I don’t and the idea of living differently starts to feel so daunting as to be unimaginable. I absolutely can’t recommend it and have no idea how to prevent it from being an influence on Graham, though interestingly my parents are/were two of the absolutely most organized people I have ever known: my father accumulating just as much paper, but meticulously keeping it in well-labeled tubs full of well-labeled folders in perfect chronological order. Maybe I just have to hope it skips generations. And to try to make sure that one of my last manic clean-up days is shortly before my last day on the planet.

This is the 13th post in the One Thing series.

Last Five
#12: That Escalated Quickly
#11: Pulling Hen’s Teeth
#10: Do the Extra Thing
#9: Climbing the Ladder
#8: Home Depot Away from Home

Introduction & First Four
#4: Forgive, Don’t Forget
#3: Call Your Mother
#2: In the Land of Make-Believe
#1: Wistful Wisteria
Introduction: Announcement and Rules