How do you build a life up from scratch?
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I appreciate the perspective in your second paragraph. I am aware of how tumultuous history makes me better at handling huge, high stakes crises (despite struggling to cope with minor issues), but I hadn't considered how that dynamic could be affecting this quest.
When you are aiming to give everything a place, do you tend to do it from a bottom-up, item-by-item perspective, or a top-down, categories-then-items approach? For example, the top down mode is like if I defined a category like "nail-care", and then listed/gathered the items that belonged to that category (nail clippers, cuticle oil, nail file, etc.) and designated a home for that category. The bottom up one might start with me actually using the nail clippers and then thinking "where should this one item go?" I find it especially hard to find homes for individual, loose items like this, but if I don't put them somewhere, then when I stumble across other things in that category (cuticle oil etc.), I can't find the nail clippers, which hinders the ability of categories to begin to form.
I find categories useful because my working memory is trash (likely ADHD related, which I should have mentioned in my post). Like, by encapsulating a list of 3 items (e.g. nail clippers, cuticle oil, nail file) with a category, it abstracts away a lot of unnecessary information and I've reduced the problem from "find homes for these three items" to "find a home for the nail stuff". Currently, the default place for most of my stuff is for it to be spread across a couple of large boxes, and that makes it impossible for categories to form. I also often find myself paralysed with dread because I have historically found it useful to ensure I return items to their designated places, and my inability to find places for things causes me to just not use the things.
My approach would be to find one thing and define it a home. For example, I keep nail clippers near my computer desk in an IKEA letter tray with other small, hard to group items like my lip balm, SD card readers, flash drives, ETC. From there, when I'm going through a bin of random shit and I find my cuticle shears, I have another item to group it with and a home for both.
If some items are hard to find a home for, create a place for those objects to live together like a found-family trope.
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What is real is what is now and that’s where you should start grounding yourself. Build systems that work for you today
that's fine if it works for you but it does definitely not work for everybody, in fact it can do more harm than good for some people.
the textbook example to this is called "dissociation" and if often affects rape victims. it is essentially the opposite of living-in-the-moment, i.e. trying to see everything as if it was very far away, because that protects against the fact that you simply cannot accept things the way that they are today.
I really don't know how to interpret this.. Grounding in the here-and-now is bad for people who dissociate? But that doesn't make sense, please explain: What do you mean?
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I really don't know how to interpret this.. Grounding in the here-and-now is bad for people who dissociate? But that doesn't make sense, please explain: What do you mean?
dissociation happens as a defensive mechanism because the subconsciousness can't deal with what it sees as the here-and-now. so it tries to take a lot of distance from the here-and-now, and that leads to dissociation. it happens especially when people are in difficult times, and trying to forcibly experience the here-and-now can people to be overwhelmed and experience too much stress, which can lead to stress-related symptoms such as heartburn, circulatory problems, and emotional dysregulation. overall, dissociation is a protective mechanism that happens naturally and is valuable overall. people shouldn't force themselves to live in the here-and-now.
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I appreciate the perspective in your second paragraph. I am aware of how tumultuous history makes me better at handling huge, high stakes crises (despite struggling to cope with minor issues), but I hadn't considered how that dynamic could be affecting this quest.
When you are aiming to give everything a place, do you tend to do it from a bottom-up, item-by-item perspective, or a top-down, categories-then-items approach? For example, the top down mode is like if I defined a category like "nail-care", and then listed/gathered the items that belonged to that category (nail clippers, cuticle oil, nail file, etc.) and designated a home for that category. The bottom up one might start with me actually using the nail clippers and then thinking "where should this one item go?" I find it especially hard to find homes for individual, loose items like this, but if I don't put them somewhere, then when I stumble across other things in that category (cuticle oil etc.), I can't find the nail clippers, which hinders the ability of categories to begin to form.
I find categories useful because my working memory is trash (likely ADHD related, which I should have mentioned in my post). Like, by encapsulating a list of 3 items (e.g. nail clippers, cuticle oil, nail file) with a category, it abstracts away a lot of unnecessary information and I've reduced the problem from "find homes for these three items" to "find a home for the nail stuff". Currently, the default place for most of my stuff is for it to be spread across a couple of large boxes, and that makes it impossible for categories to form. I also often find myself paralysed with dread because I have historically found it useful to ensure I return items to their designated places, and my inability to find places for things causes me to just not use the things.
You sound a lot like me. Most of my (admittedly small) room was packed into a giant box for over a year due to reasons beyond my control and once I was finally able to unpack it I had a meltdown because I had no actual space for anything.
My approach and my advice are different so take that as you will.
My approach: make a complaint list about all the things I couldn’t store properly and try to find some half assed furniture, then go from there. I got a small bookshelf, a set of plastic drawers and a storage mirror for my door (giant hanging mirror that is basically a jewelry box inside).
My suggestion: get some smaller, cheaper shelves/furniture/open (small!) baskets and see where stuff ends up naturally, then go from there. Eventually you’ll have more concrete complaints you can address and change as needed.
Starting from complete scratch is overwhelming, so throwing anything at a wall to see what sticks is better than nothing, at least from my own ADHD perspective.
And don’t be afraid to ask for in-person help if it’s available to you (friends, family etc.). Sounding boards/physical presence can also help massively.
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After multiple years of merely surviving, I am faced with the problem of how to start living again. I'm really struggling with the dimensionality of the problem, and I am wondering how y'all would approach this. My aim with this question is not just to receive advice relevant to my situation, but to discuss more generally different approaches to this problem.
I only realised how bad things had become when I moved home. I know that I have more stuff than I need, but because I feel like I've been living mostly on autopilot, regular decluttering heuristics haven't been helpful; if I get rid of everything I haven't used in X time, then I'd get rid of most things I own. Even before I moved, there was a feedback loop where when I needed to use an item, it was never where I expected it to be, so I never used it. Then the more that this happened, the more that stuff would be boxed away, out of sight out of mind. In the past, I've found it useful to put away items in the first place I looked for them, but that doesn't work for items that I don't know how to begin searching for them; I don't have much in the way of categories, so I often end up rummaging in boxes of assorted objects.
Part of this problem is that I definitely need to buy some more storage furniture, like shelves or drawers, but it's hard to do that if I don't know how many different categories there are, or how large they are. Sometimes it's possible to come at the organisation from the opposite direction and say "given the storage available to me, what items do I need and how should I arrange them?", but I have so much of a blank slate that I don't know where to start. It's like trying to solve the equation "a + b + c = 20": there are too many unknowns and I get swamped by all the possibilities. I'm good at solving problems when I'm given a set of constraints and a goal, but I'm overwhelmed by having to devise the constraints and goals from scratch. I tried to start with building a baseline and carving out spaces or categories for the things I currently use, but my current baseline is so low that I complete that task quite quickly, and it only emphasises that my life, as it is now, is not enough for me.
I know that I need to ground my approach in the life that I want to lead, so that I can start making progress towards it. However, if I build systems intended to be used by the ideal version of me, I will end up with something that is incompatible with the current, emotionally broken version of me. These two versions of me are in tension with each other, and the overarching challenge is finding a route from one to the other. I don't know where to start though. I feel like I should be interrogating myself about what I actually want, but I feel ill-equipped to answer that question after many months of deprioritising my hopes or wants because of struggling to survive. I feel scared to want anything, because there are so many unknowns that I don't have a sense of what's possible. An added complexity is that I am autistic, and thus really struggle without a routine. With so much uncertainty, I am feeling unanchored, and the basics of survival are taking up so much of my executive function and burning me out. Structure begets structure for people like me, but it's hard to crystallise some certainty if you don't have anything to build around.
So please tell me if you have experienced this kind of unanchored-ness, and what helped you to move past it? If you've ever had to build your life and your space from scratch, how did you tackle the problem of carving out categories? I imagine that if you have faced this problem, that it may be something you grapple with on an ongoing basis rather than solving outright. If so, how did you manage to continue living a life that was in construction (I find that partly built systems can fall apart due to regular life demands pulling your attention and effort away before you've routinized the new thing). What advice have you found helpful in the past?
Didn't read much of any of the post or replies, but I think I get the gist of it all.
I'm 54 for reference sake.
Seems to me life is composed of seasons. You have some good seasons, some bad ones, but they're just seasons of your life, summers and winters.
Go read some Kurt Vonnegut. Seriously. I honestly think his words and fiction will give you some grounding. See if this helps:
“To the As-Yet-Unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolf Waltz, and that was that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They said I was in Midland City, Ohio, and that was that. They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon detail. They do it still. You know what they say now? They say the year is 1982, and that i am fifty years old. Blah blah blah.”
Meh. In any case:
“Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
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dissociation happens as a defensive mechanism because the subconsciousness can't deal with what it sees as the here-and-now. so it tries to take a lot of distance from the here-and-now, and that leads to dissociation. it happens especially when people are in difficult times, and trying to forcibly experience the here-and-now can people to be overwhelmed and experience too much stress, which can lead to stress-related symptoms such as heartburn, circulatory problems, and emotional dysregulation. overall, dissociation is a protective mechanism that happens naturally and is valuable overall. people shouldn't force themselves to live in the here-and-now.
I still dont see how that's relevant to the comment you replied to in the context of this thread.
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After multiple years of merely surviving, I am faced with the problem of how to start living again. I'm really struggling with the dimensionality of the problem, and I am wondering how y'all would approach this. My aim with this question is not just to receive advice relevant to my situation, but to discuss more generally different approaches to this problem.
I only realised how bad things had become when I moved home. I know that I have more stuff than I need, but because I feel like I've been living mostly on autopilot, regular decluttering heuristics haven't been helpful; if I get rid of everything I haven't used in X time, then I'd get rid of most things I own. Even before I moved, there was a feedback loop where when I needed to use an item, it was never where I expected it to be, so I never used it. Then the more that this happened, the more that stuff would be boxed away, out of sight out of mind. In the past, I've found it useful to put away items in the first place I looked for them, but that doesn't work for items that I don't know how to begin searching for them; I don't have much in the way of categories, so I often end up rummaging in boxes of assorted objects.
Part of this problem is that I definitely need to buy some more storage furniture, like shelves or drawers, but it's hard to do that if I don't know how many different categories there are, or how large they are. Sometimes it's possible to come at the organisation from the opposite direction and say "given the storage available to me, what items do I need and how should I arrange them?", but I have so much of a blank slate that I don't know where to start. It's like trying to solve the equation "a + b + c = 20": there are too many unknowns and I get swamped by all the possibilities. I'm good at solving problems when I'm given a set of constraints and a goal, but I'm overwhelmed by having to devise the constraints and goals from scratch. I tried to start with building a baseline and carving out spaces or categories for the things I currently use, but my current baseline is so low that I complete that task quite quickly, and it only emphasises that my life, as it is now, is not enough for me.
I know that I need to ground my approach in the life that I want to lead, so that I can start making progress towards it. However, if I build systems intended to be used by the ideal version of me, I will end up with something that is incompatible with the current, emotionally broken version of me. These two versions of me are in tension with each other, and the overarching challenge is finding a route from one to the other. I don't know where to start though. I feel like I should be interrogating myself about what I actually want, but I feel ill-equipped to answer that question after many months of deprioritising my hopes or wants because of struggling to survive. I feel scared to want anything, because there are so many unknowns that I don't have a sense of what's possible. An added complexity is that I am autistic, and thus really struggle without a routine. With so much uncertainty, I am feeling unanchored, and the basics of survival are taking up so much of my executive function and burning me out. Structure begets structure for people like me, but it's hard to crystallise some certainty if you don't have anything to build around.
So please tell me if you have experienced this kind of unanchored-ness, and what helped you to move past it? If you've ever had to build your life and your space from scratch, how did you tackle the problem of carving out categories? I imagine that if you have faced this problem, that it may be something you grapple with on an ongoing basis rather than solving outright. If so, how did you manage to continue living a life that was in construction (I find that partly built systems can fall apart due to regular life demands pulling your attention and effort away before you've routinized the new thing). What advice have you found helpful in the past?
I have moved so often,that my wife more or less demanded that my wedding vowels include that we never will move without a professional company again. And I don't mean "within the same city". Multiple countries around the world, 17.000km are the furthest in one step, in total close to 100k km. Once intercontinental mere months after a life altering injury and only weeks since the last hospital stay(bonus: Wife was preggo as well and suffering a lot). So I have some experience with being unanchored and getting it back on track under hard conditions.
First and foremost: Take it slow.
Getting your life "back on track" is a marathon,not a sprint.
Surviving everyday life is already hard enough and the extra effort for"getting back on track" isn't possible every day. That's simply unrealistic. Especially in the beginning everything is often so improvised that it needs extra effort which in turn then leads to less energy to actually fix things. That's normal. We are all human.
Next important point: Don't make a big concept. IT.WONT.WORK.
Planning ahead massively and have one big plan how you want to organise everything, do this and that,etc. just costs you time,sometimes money and a lot of energy. And by the time you arrive at step XY the circumstances have changed and you need to redo everything. Or not. You will never fulfill such a plan fully - and that can often drain motivation to actually do things from one.Another one: Little organisation, little steps, little successes.
I love Kanban boards for that. Make a "Small plan". "organising the cable drawers" is currently on mine. "Buy bins" "Print Labels for USB-C cables","Enter cables into snipeit" are tasks on it.
It doesn't take much to enter these, each task is small enough to be done in half an hour. And it gives you a good sense of accomplishment - you visually see that you have moved two or three tasks in the "Finished" row. Yay! Dopamine!Lastly: Use tools. Especially when you have a lot of "small stuff". Homebox, Snipeit,Grocy or a simple Excel/LibreCalc Spreadsheet. It doesn't matter. But it helps.
But stay realistic. Will you really scan all the food items in your fridge all the time from now on? Rather unlikely. But maybe the rarely used cans in a hiden corner or the emergency supply things should be.
Same goes for cables and stuff.You can do it.
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I have found that a similar approach has drastically decreased the amount of unnecessary stuff I have over the course of many years. The problem that I'm faced with now is that the various high quality things that I mindfully bought are functionally out of reach because everything is boxed up and disorganised.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Do you have a good idea of what you have, and just don't know where it is? I struggle with organization (understatement) so mostly have to aggressively edit, throw things out. But we are in a medium sized house now and not planning to move so I've been working on it for 5 years or so.
As you asked about equipment or furniture - I have those strong wire shelves like you'd find in a commercial kitchen, they can hold anything, and look ok, if you have room for one of those I recommend.
Clothes in a closet with a basket for things that need to be laundered is where I would start, then a bookshelf, then one of those strong steel wire shelves for other stuff - I have one for non-perishable foods and cooking equipment (cook a lot) another in a big closet for "everything else" - gardening stuff, batteries, cords, chemicals, Halloween decorations, etc. With each category on these shelves having a zone.
The big shelf is good because you can open one box and arrange it's contents on the shelf, then another, and you can see it more easily. Your categories may become more obvious as you work.
I know some legit organized people but can't do what they do, I get overwhelmed when there is too much. And no it's never done, like really done.
In terms of advice, what stuck with me was if you haven't used something in a long time give it away. Sure you may need another in five years but that's five years you didn't have it taking up space in your home and your mind.
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Adam Savage once pointed out that organization isn't a problem to be solved it's a process to be managed. You won't find a perfect solution, but you can try things out and see how they work and make more changes later once you have new data to work with.
If you have been just surviving, you probably haven't had the luxury of indecision. You need solutions, answers, and only have time for the things on the critical path. Now you're off that path and things are less straightforward. Take any advice you like, but understand the real answer will be something you need to grow yourself by fertilizing the soil with ideas and giving them time to either grow or rot.
That said, my organization starts with giving everything a place. It doesn't have to be a perfect place, or even a good place at first, and can just be wherever it is right now.
When you use the item, it returns to it's place. As you learn how you use the items, you can then start changing their place to be better. You're thinking about categories, but that comes from how you use or intend to use that item. That is knowledge you need to develop again, so don't worry about it yet.
For furniture I like things that have clearly separate spaces that can be filled as I define things. The Kallax line of IKEA shelves is great as they are just cubes you can fill with bins, objects, or split with shelves and drawers. I move then around constantly, but that's fine since this isn't a problem to solve and in just managing the process.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I think of my things has having 3 ur-categories. Things that are used constantly, things that are used regularly, and things that are used seldom.
Things that are used constantly should simply be available. They should be in the spot where you can just grab them. Think, like, car keys.
Things that are used regularly should be stored with things they will be used with. For example, you can store your coffee in the same cabinet that you store your coffee mugs in.
Things that are used seldom should be stored with things they are like. For example, spare usb cables should be stored with the other spare usb cables, which are stored with all the other spare cables, which are stored with all the other electronics odds and ends. This is basically leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for yourself to follow when you scratch your head and wonder where you stored your spare usb cables.
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Didn't read much of any of the post or replies, but I think I get the gist of it all.
I'm 54 for reference sake.
Seems to me life is composed of seasons. You have some good seasons, some bad ones, but they're just seasons of your life, summers and winters.
Go read some Kurt Vonnegut. Seriously. I honestly think his words and fiction will give you some grounding. See if this helps:
“To the As-Yet-Unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolf Waltz, and that was that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They said I was in Midland City, Ohio, and that was that. They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon detail. They do it still. You know what they say now? They say the year is 1982, and that i am fifty years old. Blah blah blah.”
Meh. In any case:
“Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
Come on, Ohio is not that big of a shithole
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After multiple years of merely surviving, I am faced with the problem of how to start living again. I'm really struggling with the dimensionality of the problem, and I am wondering how y'all would approach this. My aim with this question is not just to receive advice relevant to my situation, but to discuss more generally different approaches to this problem.
I only realised how bad things had become when I moved home. I know that I have more stuff than I need, but because I feel like I've been living mostly on autopilot, regular decluttering heuristics haven't been helpful; if I get rid of everything I haven't used in X time, then I'd get rid of most things I own. Even before I moved, there was a feedback loop where when I needed to use an item, it was never where I expected it to be, so I never used it. Then the more that this happened, the more that stuff would be boxed away, out of sight out of mind. In the past, I've found it useful to put away items in the first place I looked for them, but that doesn't work for items that I don't know how to begin searching for them; I don't have much in the way of categories, so I often end up rummaging in boxes of assorted objects.
Part of this problem is that I definitely need to buy some more storage furniture, like shelves or drawers, but it's hard to do that if I don't know how many different categories there are, or how large they are. Sometimes it's possible to come at the organisation from the opposite direction and say "given the storage available to me, what items do I need and how should I arrange them?", but I have so much of a blank slate that I don't know where to start. It's like trying to solve the equation "a + b + c = 20": there are too many unknowns and I get swamped by all the possibilities. I'm good at solving problems when I'm given a set of constraints and a goal, but I'm overwhelmed by having to devise the constraints and goals from scratch. I tried to start with building a baseline and carving out spaces or categories for the things I currently use, but my current baseline is so low that I complete that task quite quickly, and it only emphasises that my life, as it is now, is not enough for me.
I know that I need to ground my approach in the life that I want to lead, so that I can start making progress towards it. However, if I build systems intended to be used by the ideal version of me, I will end up with something that is incompatible with the current, emotionally broken version of me. These two versions of me are in tension with each other, and the overarching challenge is finding a route from one to the other. I don't know where to start though. I feel like I should be interrogating myself about what I actually want, but I feel ill-equipped to answer that question after many months of deprioritising my hopes or wants because of struggling to survive. I feel scared to want anything, because there are so many unknowns that I don't have a sense of what's possible. An added complexity is that I am autistic, and thus really struggle without a routine. With so much uncertainty, I am feeling unanchored, and the basics of survival are taking up so much of my executive function and burning me out. Structure begets structure for people like me, but it's hard to crystallise some certainty if you don't have anything to build around.
So please tell me if you have experienced this kind of unanchored-ness, and what helped you to move past it? If you've ever had to build your life and your space from scratch, how did you tackle the problem of carving out categories? I imagine that if you have faced this problem, that it may be something you grapple with on an ongoing basis rather than solving outright. If so, how did you manage to continue living a life that was in construction (I find that partly built systems can fall apart due to regular life demands pulling your attention and effort away before you've routinized the new thing). What advice have you found helpful in the past?
If you're looking for books, there are a couple that might be some help. First one I've read and is good to start. Second one is on my todo list.
Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD
Order from Chaos The Everyday Grind of Staying Organized with Adult ADHD by Jaclyn Paul
Generally I think it's helpful to both start top down and bottom up at the same time. Get some little clear bins that latch. Put things that seem to belong in a bin then use painters tape and a marker to describe it. Tape because it's cheap and very easy to reconfigure what a bin is for of things change. a lot easier to change what doesn't work once you have started.
