A Gradual Unf*cking
A thing you do after you've been f*cking things up for months.
If you missed my last writing (and the break to my unintentional hiatus), the TLDR is that we recently took our house off the market after many months of constant showings (and therefore constant cleaning).
An unfortunate consequence of showings in our house was our tendency to shove anything that didn’t have an immediate/obvious home into some random cupboard or drawer. A gradual fucking of all the things, if you will.
A cubby within a closet near the front door, stuffed to the brim with notebooks, debit cards needing activated, toys, Christmas lights, unaesthetic baskets, charging cords, single socks, really anything you can think of.
A random drawer in the guest bathroom occupied by bath toys that got too gross and slimy to continued being played with, but too unimportant to be washed within a reasonable time, and subsequently forgotten.
A linen cupboard on the landing holding all the electronic bits and bobbles from the TV room. Broken PlayStation controllers, discs without cases, Season 1 and Season 3 box sets of the TV show Charmed (regrettably couldn’t find Season 2 at the thrift store) (and yes, the original show, not the remake). Also some pieces of the steam cleaner, because why not?
A drawer in my son’s dresser currently housing sunscreen I accidentally stole from my sister-in law, the remote to the window A/C unit that’s been put away for weeks, more charging cords, my vitamins, and the fancy red light that I got IG-influenced into buying.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
Things are fucked. It’s annoying. I don’t know where anything in my house is. Is it in a nicely labeled box, packed away in the garage? Or is it shoved into the 1-inch gap behind the chest freezer because we needed it quickly out of sight?
So, in the days since our house has been off the market, I’ve been attempting a gradual unfucking. I made my son a very-Montessori, very-practical-life-activity of washing his own dang slimy bath toys. I emptied the catch-all-cubby-of-death and put all the things where they actually belong. *gasp*
I have a good friend from my days as a corporate ~Girl Boss~ that I still keep in touch with. We have a variety of sayings that we used to use to motivate each other and ourselves at work like “you can do hard things”, “everything is figureoutable”, etc. (We have since evolved to using these phrases to discuss things like canning and parenting a toddler). But the one that has always stuck with me the most is “1% better”. Just make something 1% better. Usually, by making something 1% better, you’ve gotten out of the rut of just *starting* and can use that momentum to make it even 10% better! I probably use this phrase 4-5 days a week for most aspects of my life.
In making something 1% better everyday, I am gradually unfucking all the mistakes and shortcuts we (mostly I) made while in survival mode trying to sell our house. There are definitely days where things get 100% worse and nothing gets 1% better, even when your house isn’t on the market, when you’re just living your regular life. But that’s okay. It will get at least 1% better tomorrow. Just gradually unfucking all the things, all the time. That sounds good enough for me.
Plus, I found a Starbucks gift card with 58 cents on it inside a box of stationary.
Neat-o.