Disorganized to Organized

Being organized was a skill I always thought people were born with.  It was a skill I envied in the people who had it and a skill I mourned that I didn’t have.  To me organized people seemed so calm where I seemed to always be living in a state of chaos.  I couldn’t find things I needed when I needed them.  I couldn’t remember for the life of me where I had just put that paper I needed even though I knew I  put it somewhere specific so I could find it when I needed it.  I spent a lot of my free time looking for things and quite a bit of money buying new stuff that I knew I had but couldn’t find only to  come across it a week later.

I had lived this unorganized way all along but shortly after Hubby and I got married I decided that I really wanted our home to be a place where we could relax, where we could escape the cares of the world, a place where we could de-stress.  In the current state it was in with my complete lack of organization skills it was anything but those things.  I took to the internet and came across a book called Making Your Home a Haven: strategies for the Domestically Challenged.  This was the perfect book for me.  I wanted my home to be a haven and I was definitely domestically challenged.  I began employing the strategies in the book, particularly decluttering.  I got rid of things, put items in labeled bins, got our paperwork in order, and got our home into pretty good shape.

The problem is I didn’t stick with it. I still felt that I hadn’t been given the organizing gene and that it was too much work to upkeep. So the piles came back, the paperwork got lost, the clutter accumulated again.  And I was okay with it.  I thought, hey I tried, being organized just isn’t for me.

Fast forward a few years and now I’m a mom.  And not just a mom, but a mom to a medically fragile child with extreme special needs.  I nearly drowned.  I was so overwhelmed.  I was constantly on the go to Drs appointments, up all hours of the night, pumping milk and feeding all the time. I had so much to keep track of and I couldn’t find anything when I needed it.  There was a never ending stream of paperwork coming into the house and even more needing to go out.  I felt so out of control and the disorganization around me was suffocating.

It was too much and I knew that if I was going to not only survive but get to a point where I could thrive in  my new role, I needed to take a long and hard look at what I had control over to change.  And it came down to working on being organized and giving up the notion that it wasn’t for me.  I needed to understand that it was a skill  that may not come easily to me but like any other skill  if I worked at it I could become good at it.

So out of a place of complete desperation I delved into learning how to be organized.  Along the way I discovered that I loved being organized.  I loved creating systems to simplify my life so that I could enjoy more of what matters and not waste so much time in chaos.  As I got more areas of my life organized I began to feel like I had some breathing room.  I stopped being such a ball of stress and began relaxing more into my new role.

Being organized has really changed my life.  Part of the by-product of being a mom to a child with special needs was an intense craving for peace and order in my life.  This craving was for internal peace and order as well as external peace and order.  There are many things that I have done to satisfy this craving but one of the most important ones has been becoming and staying organized.

In future posts I will be sharing more in depth how I transitioned from disorganized to more organized and tips that I have come across along the way.  I am definitely not an expert on organization and still have seasons where I have to work really hard to maintain this skill.  However I have come a long way and I look forward to sharing helpful tips in the area of organization and also learning new ones from you!

What about you?  Was there a time in your life when you realized you needed to learn a new skill you thought you couldn’t and found it was worth the effort it took?

 (Photo Credit)