Emotional Spring Cleaning

I should be subjected to some sort of electric shock of increasing frequency and severity whenever I let posting lapse for more than seven days. I wonder if there is a WordPress plugin for that.

Failing that, I at least have a persistent nagging in the depths of my soul. PETER, growls my inner OCD Godzilla (a voracious blog reader), YOUR BLOG IS STALE. A week and a half, maybe he can bear. Two weeks and he starts exhaling tiny wafts of smoke from his nose, and I’m like, Godzilla doesn’t breathe fire, right?

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I read a lot of blogs about betterment, simplification, and frugality. They all dole out advice about organizing and eliminating – make a clear surface or a paid off credit card, and then it’s easier to avoid the things you would clutter it with.

I’ll never quite attain that clear-surface perfection in my physical existence, but this past year I’ve been struggling to get there in my intellectual life.

A little over a year ago I had a lot of stuff on every surface of my mind. Event-planning. Marriage. Marketing. Songwriting. Blogging. Some piles were deeper. Identity management. Seemingly unfixable relationships.

For the past year every time I read one of those decluttering blog posts, instead of decluttering my desk or my bureau I decluttered some recess of my psyche.

It was scary for a while. I jettisoned some stuff I thought was pretty central to my existence. But you know what? None of it was. I am a husband, a songwriter, a blogger, a music-lover, a communicator, and an occasional activist.

All of the other stuff is just ornamentation, and there’s a thin line between emotional tchotchkes and emotional clutter.

And, anyway, OCD Godzilla needs a lot of space to roam. He is a free-range imaginary beast of the psyche.