Heard it on the Podcast - July 31, 2024

  

Did you miss a link we mentioned on the podcast? Here's a quick post we do most Wednesdays to share any links or information from the podcast. We'll also keep a running post on the "Links from the Podcast" tab so you can refer back to any previous episode. Here are the links for this week:

31-Jul-2024

S4E31: 7 Secrets to the Perfect Kitchen

Listen to the podcast:   HERE

Mentioned on the podcast:

• Podcast Episode #250 (12/7/22):  7 Secrets of a Perfect Holiday
• My 7 Secrets for a Perfect Holiday:  Blog Post (12/5/22) 
• The Secret is...:  Blog Post (12/9/22)
• Podcast Episode #214 (3/30/22):  What Kind of Clutterbug Are You?
• Heard it on the Podcast (3/30/22)
• I'm a Clutterbug: Blog Post (3/28/22)
• Out with the Old: Blog Post (3/31/22)
• Blog Post (4/2/22)

#makeyourbedchallenge

Hi everyone! I am just going to come right out and say it! I am struggling! I am so behind on what I feel I need to be doing, should be doing and what others expect me to do. I tend to jump into things head first with great intentions and then I suddenly feel like an octopus trying to juggle flaming torches, knives, and hand grenades. I am sure that I am a thousand blogs behind, and let's not talk about the unfinished tasks that I have had to get help on recently. I feel so defeated sometimes. I know that we can all feel this way from time to time, and I know this is a safe place to talk about it. I have a lot of exciting things going on in my life, too, so it can all be an emotional rollercoaster. This blog post has a happy ending, I can assure you that.

Me: feeling overwhelmed!

So, what have I been doing to help with the overwhelming feelings of stress? 

Listening to myself:

I opened a letter that came in the mail recently that was unmarked. I had this gut feeling that it was something terrible. That is probably an automatic response from getting so many bills and unwanted notices in the mail. I hardly ever get good stuff in my mailbox. Well, I started to open this letter, and as I do so, I am paying attention to my feelings. I have been doing a lot of shadow work lately and because of it, I am open to receiving messages from within. The message I heard today was loud and clear. My heart was saying, “My life is falling apart.” In all honesty, yes, I feel wound up and simultaneously over stretched, but surely my life is not falling apart! Part of me wanted to tell myself to not be so overdramatic, but the compassionate part of me reminded me that anything that can come by mail, can be handled. There is nothing that would destroy my family so much that I would truly feel that my life was falling apart. I have to be the voice of reason for myself, as well as comforting and accepting. If you are curious what was in the mail, it was some junk about my husband’s car warranty expiring, nothing worth my day spinning out of control over. 

Doing that one hard thing - and asking for help with it:

I had a daunting task that has been looming over my head for the past year. It has been something that I have been avoiding for various reasons. I start getting those excuses in my head for why I can’t do something or why I should do it later, and sure enough, it starts to sound like a broken record in my head. This is something that I have been working on with my therapist. I tend to associate social discomfort with physical discomfort, and it makes my life very challenging. I end up “punishing myself” because I have a self-limiting belief that I can’t accomplish the task, and then I punish myself for not completing it. This particular task is something that, because I was avoiding it, I didn’t allow myself to enjoy doing other things – that was my punishment. I had to do it though. And yes, there are some things that you don’t have to do, but this was one of those things that just needed to be done. I was tired of not doing it, and I knew that the only way it would get done was if I enlisted someone else's help. Thankfully that person obliged, I didn’t even have to explain myself. I know I will owe them a huge favor. But sometimes you just have to call your friend over to “kill the spider.” Now that this spider has been killed, I am ready to move on to the next one, I no longer feel paralyzed by it. 

Making space to enjoy my life:

I was starting to feel the walls closing in. I’m not really that claustrophobic, but I do start to feel like a bull in a china shop. When I feel like I can’t move around without knocking things over, or having to move-things-to-get-to-other-things-so-I-can do-things, I get really frustrated. I get overwhelmed, panicky, and spin out. I become useless and shut down. I will retreat into a book or television, and the rest of my day is toast. Since I was feeling overwhelmed one day, I decided to watch some videos on YouTube. I thought it might be relaxing to watch some organization videos. Sometimes watching other people clean can be really satisfying. I stumbled across some videos of people decluttering, and I was hooked. I found it so exhilarating to see people hold up a plastic cup from a restaurant and explain that they have 50 cups and they don’t need this one in particular and toss it in the recycle bin. It actually got me pumped. I then started decluttering while I was watching the video. This whole week has been quite refreshing as I have been inspired to do a clean sweep of many of the messy areas in our home that tend to get over-stacked. I went through the pantry and tossed a bunch of expired food. We decluttered the fridge. I ransacked Reyna’s room while she was at her grandpa’s house and threw away a lot of trash, and I even got a donation box with some of her toys and baby books put together. My motivation was even rubbing off on my husband, Travis. He was willing to part ways with some of the unused tumblers and Tupperware that was stuffed in all the nooks and crannies. Some of the most inspiring videos were from Cassandra Aarssen from Clutterbug. We blogged about what type of Clutterbug we were and discussed the quiz on the podcast last year. I was really planning to do my spring cleaning in the spring, but this year I just couldn’t wait to get started. I started out in the game closet and ever since I dumped out an entire box of hard playdough without a second thought, I have been a changed woman. I find myself decluttering everywhere I go in the house. I even decluttered my sewing case while I was at a retreat this weekend. I dumped a handful of miscellaneous buttons in the trash that I have been toting around with me for 20+ years, and it was so freeing! Another great vlogger that I want to share is The Minimal Mom - The Myth of Being Behind. This particular video reminds us that we are not behind, we are doing what we are capable of doing at the time. In the world of Pinterest perfectionism we need to be reminded that we are normal and it’s ok. 

I am feeling better about my situation in life. It is not actually spinning out of control, that’s just a mindset. Life is a work in progress. And, for real, if you read this far, I really appreciate it! There is just something so powerful about putting my words out there, speaking my truth, and hashing it out. I feel so much better now than I did 45 minutes ago. 

I encourage you to check out our podcast coming out on Wednesday. Motivation and life hacks are abundant. This week we are talking about the “Make Your Bed Challenge”. I don’t know if that is a real thing or not but we made it a challenge. Starting March 1st we are challenging ourselves and our listeners and readers to do the challenge with us! This is a productivity challenge. We go into detail behind the reasoning as to why it is important to start your day off by making your bed every day. So if you feel like your life is spinning out of control or you need a little more regimentation and order in your life, Wednesday’s podcast is for you. So start your day off by making the bed, and remember that intention is better than perfection. 

If you participate in our "Make Your Bed Every Day" Challenge, be sure to tag us on your Facebook and Instagram posts:  @ModernMusingsMMC and #mmcmakeyouredchallenge

This week on the podcast, we talked about clutter and its tendency to collect in our homes. We had some fun laughs about the reality of our messes, too! I was inspired by our talk and the information provided from my www.Clutterbug.me results. I wanted to share my before and after pictures of my Clutterbug project – my kitchen.

Travis and I still had a box in our kitchen from when we moved almost 10 months ago. I was fed up with looking at that box one day, and unloaded it onto the kitchen island. The idea was to identify what was in the box and then put the items away, but I ran out of time to find a new home for these last straggling items, so they stayed in that spot. Now they were sitting on the catch-all, an already cluttered problem area of my home. 

The clutter got so bad, we could no longer work at the kitchen island, and complacency had become the norm. Each day, one more thing wound up on the island and did not leave. My husband even started leaving the groceries out; instead of putting a can in the pantry while unloading the groceries, the can would find its new home on the island. 

Clutter stacking up on the kitchen island, inside the cabinets, and "the box".

Since the Clutterbug quiz suggested storing things in clear containers, I got these acrylic bins from amazon. Unfortunately, I did not measure my cabinet space (whoops), and the bins are too big for my pantry. I was able to use a few of them around the kitchen, and I will get some smaller ones for the pantry. I can use the remaining large ones in my craft room. 

This week I worked a lot of overtime at work, so I haven’t had as much energy or time to dedicate to my organizing. I did however decide to organize the cups though. The clutter was persistently on my mind after I had mentioned them in an earlier blog. The nice thing about spring cleaning is that it doesn't have to be done all at once. In fact, the best thing to do is one small area or task at a time. There are a few areas that got worked over that I didn’t capture with my camera – mainly the pantry. I tossed out a lot of half eaten cracker sleeves, stale cookies, old protein bars, and random odds and ends that were taking up space. 

I'm happy the way the catch all areas turned out.

For the near future, I have plans to clear out the utensil drawer and utilize the empty cabinet space above the fridge, but I know that it will be little by little. I don’t want to try and do a total overhaul on the kitchen all at once, which would wreck a major working area in our home. Next up after the kitchen will be my dressing table where there are a slew of cosmetics, hair products, earrings, and misc. items strewn about. I am really looking forward to that much needed project.

Have you had a chance to check out the Clutterbug quiz to see what type of Clutterbug you are? I’d love to hear about your style! Maybe you can share some tips in the comments! 

Out With the Old

It’s the summer of 2014 and I’m standing in the house I grew up in amongst the trash and remnants of my childhood. I feel sadness about the years of neglect as the last of the boxes are hastily packed in a moving truck and carted off to storage. When does a bit of clutter turn into the tendency to hoard?

Hoarding is the difficulty of parting with possessions because of a perceived need to save them. When we think of hoarding, we often think of the popular television show that airs on A&E. Those, of course, are extreme cases of hoarding. I never thought that it could run in my family. However, according to Psychiatry.org, hoarding does run in the family, and I fight my tendency to hoard constantly because I love to shop. That summer, my dad was downsizing from a three-bedroom house to a two-bedroom apartment, and I discovered that my parents kept everything. They never threw anything away. As I was going through 20-year-old bills and throwing away food that was years out of date, I thought to myself that I would never become a hoarder to this extent.

Boy, was I wrong!

At the time, my mom explained to me the sentimentality of 40 plus years of marriage, and how one just “collects” things over the years. Yeah, I got that, but I only had a few possessions that I could never get rid of. I will admit that I am a book hoarder; I’ve kept every book that I ever read, and carried every book (including a dictionary collection) with me every time I moved once I turned 18 – and I moved every two years. I couldn’t fathom hoarding bills and receipts as my mom had done. I regularly shredded my mail. I have never been a fan of clutter, but it was something I dealt with growing up. I always remembered our house being so full of things that it was oftentimes hard to walk through.

As an adult, I thought I was done with the clutter and the hoarding, but then I married a hoarder. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my ex-husband did little things that bothered me, like never throwing away trash, and it reminded me of my dad in the sense that he didn’t throw away trash either. They say women tend to marry their fathers, and I felt like I was always picking up after both of them. Throughout our relationship, my ex and I also began to pick up clutter and possessions. After we moved from a three-bedroom house to a two-bedroom, I realized that we had become hoarders. We kept everything that anyone had ever given us, and it was hard to neatly organize our living space.

When quarantine hit in 2020, I suddenly had to teach from home, and I found I had no space in which to even set up a desk. My ex-husband and I had so much stuff that we were navigating through little trails to get through our house and the piled-up boxes. Deja vu. After our separation, I made some SMART goals that would get me through 2021 and one of them was to get rid of the clutter.

Christen gave me some sage advice when I started the process. She quoted Marie Kondo, “look at everything and ask yourself, ‘does this make me happy?’” So, I did. It took me three months and about 10 trips to the thrift store to downsize my life after my divorce. I went through every possession I owned and considered whether it made me happy. When I was done, I no longer felt like a hoarder. I felt great…accomplished.

So, why does getting rid of stuff feel so good?

According to the article “Why Getting Rid of Stuff Feels So Good” by Shifrah Combiths, there are several reasons why getting rid of stuff makes us feel so good, but the reason that resonates with me the most is that “separating from the past can heal” and that is what I did. I hung on to so many things because there was a sentimental value attached to them. I didn’t want to get rid of certain things because “my mom gave it to me” or “my dad used it” at this certain time. But, I realized that possessions aren’t memories, and I can still keep the memories of my parents within me without keeping every single thing that they owned. That, in itself, was freeing.

So, whenever I tend to hoard or my house gets to the point where the clutter is out of control, I remember that moment I had eight years ago when I realized that there is such a thing as “too much.”

Are you a clutter bug? Are there things that you keep and you don’t know why? Let me know in the comments, and let’s continue the conversation in our Facebook Group.

You can find Marie Kondo’s website here.

Heard It on the Podcast - March 30, 2022

 

Did you miss a link we mentioned on the podcast? Here's a quick post we'll do every Wednesday to share any links or information from the podcast. We'll also keep a running post on the "Links from the Podcast" tab so you can refer back to any previous episode. Here's the links for this week:

30-MAR-2022

S2E14: What Kind of Clutterbug Are You?

• What Kind of Clutterbug Are You? (Quiz):  https://clutterbug.me
• Totally Tiffany: https://totally-tiffany.com
• Thistle Creative Reuse, Denton, Texas: https://thistlecreativereuse.com

* Please note, as an Amazon Affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Heard It on the Podcast - March 23, 2022

 

Did you miss a link we mentioned on the podcast? Here's a quick post we'll do every Wednesday to share any links or information from the podcast. We'll also keep a running post on the "Links from the Podcast" tab so you can refer back to any previous episode. Here's the links for this week:

23-MAR-2022

S2E13: Manifesting

• One Little Word by Ali Edwards:  https://aliedwards.com/projects/one-little-word
• Cultivate What Matters and Power Sheets:  https://cultivatewhatmatters.com/pages/about
• Christine Kane:  https://christinekane.com/about/
• The Secret (Book):  https://amzn.to/3sIokef
• The Secret (Movie):  https://amzn.to/3ChRfsL
• M. Night Shaymalan's Signs:  https://amzn.to/3hJ2h0I
• What Kind of Clutterbug Are You? (Quiz):  https://clutterbug.me

* *Please note, as an Amazon Affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases.