Decrapifying My Life

When you put your house in order, you put your affairs and your past in order, too.
                                                                                                               - Marie Kondo


There's a scene in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" where Kylo Ren stares at Darth Vader's burned out helmet and cries out, "Grandfather, give me strength!" Lately here, I've been staring at Marie Kondo's book and crying out, "Kon Marie, give me strength!"

My big project this past month has been cleaning out my office. I started applying Marie Kondo's principles to my house last Spring. Unlike the suggestion in her book I could not "Kondo" my home in one fell swoop. Part of it is because I don't live alone. My husband and children are not on board. Instead, what I've done is try to get my own life in order. I'll worry about them once my shit's together. In the meanwhile, I am decrapifying my life.

As the rest of my house came to order, my office turned into the repository of all things "left over." To keep or not to keep? Let's put it in my office for now.

As a result, it came to look like this...

 

 

It was a space filled with unfinished craft projects, scrapbooking memorabilia, toys the kids couldn't part with but didn't want in their rooms. A repository of memories and dreams, so cluttered I could no longer see much of the floor, no less work on any of the said unfinished projects. It was time to let some of it go.

I'm a sentimental person. I think that's why scrapbooking appeals to me so much. Kon Marie would tell me to get rid of it all and just keep the memories in my heart but she also said to keep the things that give you joy and my finished scrapbooks still give me great joy. My children love looking at them too. So... scrapbooking stuff had to get organized. All the memorabilia I want to keep is now in 3-ring binders, organized chronologically by date. I was also delighted to "find" scraps of my childhood that I had kept. I knew I had kept these things, it was just a matter of finding them again.

There was the autographed photo of Maria Tallchief. She was the closest thing I had to an idol growing up. Osage Indian by birth, she was America's first Prima Ballerina. Briefly married to George Balanchine, she danced for both the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre and founded the Chicago City Ballet. She sent me this photo while she was with Chicago City Ballet. The ballet company folded in 1987. She died in 2013.

I used to be very active in our local track and field community back in the days when Indianapolis was trying to establish itself as the "Amateur Sports Capitol of the World" so I had several opportunities to meet athletes at national and international events. These are some photos from when I was the athlete escort for the medal presentation ceremonies at the 1987 World Indoors.

The woman in the white is Merlene Ottey-Page from Jamaica.

I can't remember the other woman's name.

 

Sergey Bubka of the USSR who held the world pole vaulting record.

 

Heike Drechsler of East Germany who set the indoor long jump world record at that meet.

 

My other memory from that meet - the outfit I am wearing was tailor made for me. It's the first and only outfit that I've ever had that was tailor made. I remember driving myself down to Leon Tailoring in downtown Indianapolis to get measured for it.

 

I was a runner for the press box at the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in 1985 when Willie Banks set the world record for the triple jump. It's the first and only time I've witnessed a world record being set live and in person. I still have my credentials from that night. We stayed in the press box well past midnight that night waiting for world record verification.

 

 





I carried index cards with me that meet to get autographs.

 



Here is Dwight Stones' when he was the world record holder for the high jump.

 

All these I kept.

Some of what I didn't keep...

My wedding bouquet. I will be married for 20 years in July. It's hard to believe it's been that long. The first scrapbook I ever did was of our honeymoon but I never had time to do the wedding photos. I have the "official" photos that the professional photographer took bound in a leather album however I have a box of candids that have yet to make it into a book. I think it's the sheer volume of the photos that kept me from scrapbooking them. Anyway, these flowers pretty much turned to dust when you touched them so I took a photos and pitched them.

This is the "death mask" that I made in my 8th grade art class. I believe it was also displayed at an art show. I kept it because I had such good memories of making the mask. I made it with my friends Neil, Greg, and Gideon. They are some of the guys I hung out with. This was our art class group. To make the mask we each took turns laying on a cafeteria table with a wet paper towel on our faces while the other members of the group patched together strips of plaster casting material until it was thick enough to hold the shape of your face, and then you had to lay there until it dried enough to remove it. Needless to say, the person getting casted was pretty much helpless and blind on the table so we had all kinds of fun with that. Neil and I still hang out. We've been friends since we were six years old. I haven't talk to Greg in ages but he is a runner. If this mask was in better shape it would be hanging on my wall, but it's not so in the trash it went.

The nurses at Three Rivers Community Hospital ER gave this to me as one of their parting gifts when I left Michigan in 2001. I loved my nurses. It was a small hospital and I was the only doctor in the building for most of the day. This was the place where I learned to handle things on my own because I was the only one there. We had a pitch-in every Saturday night in the ICU. We shared Weight Watcher's recipes and scrapbooked in our free time. This gazing ball was for the garden in my new Indiana home. However, after 15 years I've yet to have that garden so I took a photo for remembrance and gave the frog away.

Then there were the unfinished projects. They were hard to pitch because they represented time that I had spent working on them. However, in my heart, I didn't want to finish them anymore.

 

This is the needlepoint rug that I started when I was pregnant with my first child. She will be 17 this year. I had to special order the wool thread in all the different colors for this project. I had envisioned myself sitting in a rocker next to her crib, needlepointing while watching her sleep. Wrong. This was my baby that NEVER SLEPT!! Needless to say, this project never got done and the desire is gone now.

 

 

This was the cover for a needlepoint plastic canvas Victorian "glove box." I used to love all things Victorian. My tastes have changed. I could never get the bottom of this box done. Part of me kept it to finish just to finish it but what's the point?

 

These are two of the many unfinished projects that I pitched. The projects that I still am excited to finish I now have out in plain sight, available to work on at a moment's notice.

 

Then there was that bed. It was part of a bunk bed and trundle bed set that the girls slept in when they shared a room. Since getting separate rooms they have both gotten different beds. One bunk was in pieces in the basement. The other bed and trundle was just taking up space and being used as a storage unit for more unneeded things in my office. I wanted to give it away to someone that I knew would use it. I posted it on my Facebook page. It was taken in one minute.

 

So here are my AFTER photos  (the BEFOREs precede them for comparison). I still have work to do but the bulk of what needed to GO is gone and I now have space to work on the projects that I WANT to do.

 

BEFORE

 

AFTER

 

BEFORE

 

AFTER

 

BEFORE

 

AFTER

 

I can't believe there was a time in my life when I desired STUFF. Now it seems I have more STUFF than time. It's time to enjoy what I have. Looking at what I had kept I was also surprised how fast the time had gone by. No more new projects until I finish what I've started (or trashed it)!