This is the third of five blog posts about organization and how I got some, against all expectations. They started life as an attempt to get my thoughts in order for a session on efficiency in bookselling that I’m presenting next week and got out of hand. I assure you nobody is more surprised than I am that I’m hosting a session about organization, but these posts explain how that happened. I think. (Though the session is specifically about efficiency and bookselling, these posts address efficiency and organization more broadly. I’ll post notes from the session later in the month.) The first post is here and the second post is here.

After the capturing and the list-making came some self-absorption. I found myself wondering why I hadn’t been able to do these fairly easy things before. I also found that I was very curious about what it meant to be organized, since I had obviously been wrong about that for years.

I’ve spent my entire life calling myself a messy person, because I have been. The messier things got, the more anxious I got, the worse it got. Because I had been that way forever, raging against that tendency seemed futile, so I learned to step over piles on the floor.

What I didn’t realize was the extent to which messyperson had become a pillar of my self-regard, and that was the only reason it kept hanging around. Every once in a while this year I’ve been surprised to hear me thinking I don’t need to clean those dishes, I’m a messy person. The first few weeks of capturing, I kept trying to cut myself slack. You’re just not an organized person, lists are boring and staid, that’s why this is so hard, I’d tell myself. It’s okay, go read awhile.

I also realized that I had a lot of resentment around having to be organized at all. My brain was constantly pushing back, armed with a lifetime of reading biographies of intellectual heroes. How many of them were messy? So many. There’s nobody who hasn’t bought into the myth of the absentminded professor, Einstein walking around without shoes, creative geniuses living in small apartments crammed in around piles of paper and apple cores. I’m not sure how many people have also used that to justify their messiness, but I definitely have.

Why did they get away with it, I’d whine to myself. How did they never have to wash dishes or do their laundry or call the dentist or spend Sunday afternoon making soup? It wasn’t fair! (As though inequality surrounding chore time was a good reason not to get my life under control, or as though I had ever in my life produced anything suggesting that I deserved the same laundry duties as Einstein.)

This was an ongoing problem until I caught myself whining while reading Carol Sklenica’s biography of Raymond Carver and neglecting a tower of dishes in the sink. Why didn’t Raymond Carver ever have to do the dishes, HUH? How come Raymond Carver just always had some clean dishes whenever he wanted them? No wonder that dude was always fucking writing, HE NEVER HAD TO TAKE ANY TIME OUT OF HIS DAY TO DO THE GODDAMN DISHES.

The realization, when it came, was embarrassingly obvious, like everything else: he never had to do the dishes because he had a wife.

I decided I had to be my own wife; even if I got one somehow, I didn’t want her to be doing the dishes all the time. She would probably have other things to do than clean up after my toast all day. Then I began to think more about how my disorganization and messiness weren’t fair to people I cared about. Just because other people might pick up the slack (and they have, oh, how they have, thank God), did I really want to keep being the person who asked them to?

The final thing I learned—at least, the final thing that I’ll admit to in public—is that I had this idea of what an organized person was like: tight-ass prissy scone-making prune-mouth check-box-licking bitchface. I did not want to be the girl who doesn’t eat spaghetti because it’s too messy. I was deathly afraid that being organized would make me (even more) boring (than I already am). This was clearly ridiculous, but most fears are this irrational and unfounded, which I assume is what makes them so powerful.

It was important to run up against these resentments. They are now more like Voldemort after all his horcruxes were broken. My fears and rationalizations about disorganization still lurk around the edges of my brain, but I feel like I might stab them to death any day. I bet most people have mental blocks around being organized, although I assume not everybody is mad about the fact that Einstein never had to do dishes. It’s really the only reason we’d keep making our lives more difficult on purpose.

The point is, I could have captured every thought in my head, but if I hadn’t turned around and captured these little fuckers too, I’m not sure it would have worked as well as it did. I think when you take steps towards becoming organized, these types of resentments and justifications turn up on their own, whatever they are, because they don’t like being disturbed. So if you decide to get organized, keep an eye out.

The whole process has led me to think a lot about what it even meant to be organized, since uncovering these resentments had put paid to my ideas that it was a genetically-based character trait that made people suck. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve decided that trying to be organized is one of the most compassionate things you can do for other people in your life. To be honest, I’m still not sure I know, which makes it hard to say with any authority that I am more organized. I know I’m definitely less stressed-out, and I definitely don’t forget things the way that I used to. But is does that count as organized? I am still thinking about it.

Tomorrow: Why It Worked.