Nothing interesting to report. I have a couple of bags of donations near the door, ready to be dropped off. The living and dining rooms are relatively tidy and clutter-free.
Still working on the cookbook situation. Not sure why it's so difficult. A commenter wondered if there might be emotions hanging around the cookbooks and memories of cooking with my mom. Well, that's a good theory, but she didn't use cookbooks. We rarely cooked together. In fact, I didn't know how to cook until about my second or third year in college when all of a sudden I started experimenting and the concepts began to gel. Very cool feeling, I still remember it. The cookbooks from that era are keepers, there are only a couple of them.
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3 comments:
I'm certain you will figure out the cookbook situation. Maybe the reason you are having trouble is because you really don't want to get rid of them? Just because you are trying to control your clutter doesn't mean you have to give up everything. :)
Are there recipes that you would miss if you got rid of some of the cookbooks? Or is there some emotional tug on your heart as far as it being an old cookbook and you just enjoy having it around? I have a few old cookbooks that I can't seem to part with for this reason.
I had an insight about some similarish clutter when I completely de-cluttered this summer. It's about best intentions.
There is stuff that I bought with every intention in the world of using because it fit in with the image of myself that I wanted to be. I was finding it hard to let go of the stuff - because it felt to me like I was giving up on that intention. Like I was giving up on myself.
And, once again - it all came down to both low self-esteem from childhood, never feeling like I could live up to my parents expectations -- and yet always feeling like there might be something that would turn it around... that if I achieved more - if I did more, if I became different in some discernible way - that somehow magically this would transform my parents into the people who actually would love me for who I really was - not who they wanted me to be.
I realized I had to never give up on me - but I did have to give up on the idea that my parents would ever really know me, respect me, like me, love me. Once I really really accepted that - and let myself be angry that it had to be that way... that I never got the parents I deserved and I never would... and that *I* had to be the parent to myself that I wanted and needed... I was able to let go of the stuff - the clutter I had been keeping.
The stuff that had been hanging around for forever -- that I hadn't touched - despite all my best intentions... that I never used... and I accepted that I never would use -- and most importantly... I didn't NEED to use.
If I really needed it, I would have found a use for it in all the years I had been holding onto it. I thought about the stuff - hard. I thought about what I felt like when I aquired it. I thought about my intentions when I bought it. I thought about my feelings surrounding aquiring it in the first place - and keeping it - despite never using it. And I realized that by keeping it - despite never using it - it was symbolically like a self-accusation. It was like believing the old messages from childhood -- "see... I told you you would never amount to anything - and all this junk that you keep is proof!" -- Terrible old messages like that from my parents.
I got rid of the stuff - because I do not need to feel guilty that *I* was never good enough for my parents. Keeping it was just one more magical way of thinking that someday, somehow, they would finally see who I was - and that I was worthwhile.
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