Champagne and Socks

Been quiet round these parts. I finally finished moving out of my place this last weekend. I’m about halfway through unpacking and being absorbed into the new place. I’m getting used to and finding a routine living with C. We’re toilet training and training a 16 week old puppy with a mind of his own. I’m working on the next 4 books I’m publishing this year. I’m looking into going to World Fantasy Con in San Diego. I’m working on backlog at ASif and slushing for TPP and reading for Galactic Suburbia and Galactic Chat. And I’ve suddenly had a promotion in role but not salary at the day job. And I missed my handover into the role last week so I am now making it all up as I go along (it’ll be fine. I’m sure).

Life is full on at the moment. Actually this year so far has felt like it has a baseball bat in hand and keeps hitting me in the face with it. Over. And over. And over. I’m beyond tired. I’m beyond feeling like it’s too much. I’m on autopilot survival mode. I’m just hoping to make it out alive.

And this weekend gone, C and I celebrated 18 months together. With a quiet night in with a glass of white and a nice haloumi pasta.

So the unpacking. It’s been stressful. Essentially, when I moved from living with the ex, four years ago, I packed everything up and had the intention of sorting and culling and downsizing. Never happened. I think I froze – paralysed I guess by the idea of change and the unknown. And I was lucky to be in a place that was big enough that I could put things in cupboards and shut the doors and not think about it. But i don’t have that luxury here. There is very little storage here at all. Any storage I want I will have to buy and I don’t want to overcrowd the place with cupboards and what not. And besides, it’s just stuff.

So for the last two weeks, I’ve had the goal of unpacking one box a day. I think I had about 35 or more boxes (not all removalists’ size, some smaller with fragile things). I’m possibly more than halfway through now. I purposely didn’t label any of the boxes so that I had to open all of them (grr) and I mixed what I packed so old stuff was mixed with new stuff, also meaning I had to unpack all the boxes. I’ve been sorting and culling and have all the designated boxes – dispose, donate, return, ebay etc. It’s still a really slow process.

The thing I’ve had to grapple with the most is being ok with this settling in being an iterative process. Unless I unpack and work out what I am keeping and where I want to put it, I can’t figure out how much storage I will need. But I need to be sort of putting things away in order to have living space. It does my head in a little that it’s inefficient in that, I will have to move and reorganise stuff again once I have unpacked everything. I’m putting things away in “for now” places. And I hate that that means doing it over again later. But what I worry about the most is losing interest part way through the process and not doing a second or third iteration. It’s easy for clutter and mess to become part of the scenery so you don’t see it anymore. That’s partly why I have so much crap now. I worry about this so much that I have started a list of things that I need to come back and do once I have finished unpacking – all my books might be unpacked in the bookcases for example but they need to be reorganised and sorted the way I like them.

I watched so many hoarding shows this year and I can see a lot of myself in those people. I don’t think I would ever get to the stage of being buried alive – the clutter gets to me and it turns out I am much neater than C and that kicks me into being super neat (when living with a less neat person). But I get how and why those hoarders end up in that place. And I get that that’s why this unpacking process is so hard for me now. It’s hard to dispose of perfectly useful and functional items – even if you already have one or don’t actually use or like it. But I am in a bit of a ruthless clean out phase – some days better than others, and I’m slowly getting there. I plan to take a bunch of perfectly useful and functional things to a women’s shelter and maybe send some of my extra craft stuff to a detention centre, if I can figure out how to do that.

And I think/hope that in the future I will think more carefully before acquiring more stuff. Moving it all is a pain in the arse.