5
" So, once again, I'm practicing trying to follow my own admonitions, the lessons the Hell Room has taught me: to trust myself. Keep less, use more. Be imperfect. Doing these things feels like stepping off a cliff into thin air, but it's paid off before when, after ten years, I finally took the medication; when after eighteen years, I finally opened the Hell Room door in earnest and decided to tell the world my ugly secret; and when, every single time over the last year, I made a decision to keep (what if I'm a hoarder?) or a decision to discard (what if I'm filled with regret?). No decision that we make about anything in life is 100 percent safe, and I know now *that's* was kills me. "
― Eve O. Schaub , Year of No Clutter
10
" I began the process of cutting up my random fabrics into strips. Of course, I chose easy things first, items that didn't' hurt me very much to cut up: torn sheets. A flannel nightgown so tattered it could never be worn again, one of Steve's worn-out t-shirts, couch upholstery.
The resulting balls of fabric yarn that I wound together after cutting astounded me. They were gorgeous--each one prettier than the last, which made me braver.
I took some photographs. And I heaved a sigh. Things in me were changing, I could feel it...so many months focusing on Stuff, Stuff, STUFF had made me bolder. What's the worst that could happen? I thought to myself. It reminded me of the day I finally, after ten years of kicking and screaming, took that first half pill [for OCD]. To someone else it might be no big deal, but to me? It felt like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. "
― Eve O. Schaub , Year of No Clutter
11
" Once, several years ago, I was looking around for something and moved a piece of furniture only to behold behind it a fuzzy little ball of...what? I looked closer, which is always a bad idea, adn jumped back with a screech. Of course, it was a dead mouse. A dead mouse that had been there long enough that it looked a little--what?--petrified.
So I did what any normal person would do in a similar circumstance. I immediately, that very minute, sat down and wrote a story about it. I wrote and wrote until I was pleased with the dead mouse story. And then I used a piece of cardboard to life and slide the little mouse corpse into a small white box--the kind you use for jewelry. After all, I reasoned, I had just written a story about him! It felt like something worse than abandonment to get rid of him now...we were linked! Connected through the sacred ritual of storytelling. And anyway, what if this story ended up, you know, famous? What if my dead mouse story ended up being my "The Lottery"? Wouldn't it be incredibly neat to still have the original thing that inspired it?
Yes, this is the way I think.
So you can see the situation is bad. I have at least one dead rodent that I have kept ON PURPOSE. "
― Eve O. Schaub , Year of No Clutter
