The Damsel's Christmas Diary Part Two: Clearing physical and emotional clutter

Sometimes, there’s just a bunch of stuff in the way before we can properly settle down and enjoy something special like Christmas.

Firstly, there’s physical clutter. Simon and I found ourselves confronted with the reality of how much stuff there was lying around in our house, when we decided to put up our Christmas decorations. Stuff does seem to multiply when one isn’t looking!

Now, we’re all different in terms of our tolerance of clutter. For example, my father had literally none – every last paperclip had its place in our home, and he couldn’t deal with any stuff lying around. When I was a child, I was allowed to be a bit messier in my room if I wanted to be, but beyond that I had to conform strictly to his no-mess policy.

Nowadays, I’m very concerned with cleanliness but a bit more relaxed about clutter – up to a point. Recently, I’ve had to increase my clutter acceptance threshold – while we’ve been relocating from London to Scotland in a somewhat complicated way, there has necessarily been more stuff…everywhere…

But I tend to reach a pivotal moment where I decide categorically that the clutter has to go. This happened when we came to put up our Christmas decorations. I have to say, taming clutter is never a job that I relish. It’s a job that I wish a benevolent fairy would finish in the wink of an eye with a flourishing swish of her magical wand! It just seems to take ages to create order out of chaos – I’m constantly bemused by how powerful the law of entropy actually is! In non-technical terms, this scientific law means that the chaos or disorder in a system will tend to increase over time, unless energy is put into that system to reverse the effect. How true that is when it comes to life clutter!

True, there is a sort of grim satisfaction when the stuff has been wrangled into a plausible state of order, but it always takes so much longer than one optimistically thinks it will at the start of the endeavour.  It really is an energy sapping task, as one tidying job morphs into three or four others and, before you know it, several hours have gone by and your back is aching.

And yet, there is a discipline associated with such organising activity. It’s a discipline that says, despite all the temptation not to bother, I will not let my life descend into chaos. It’s a discipline that says, I will put in the necessary energy and effort to ensure that my stuff in various forms is in a decent state of order!

Then there’s our emotional clutter.

A lot less obvious because it’s not physically confronting us every day, and yet every bit as cluttery, and causing all sorts of issues in our minds. Fuelling our rumination. Driving underlying anxiety levels. Preventing us from focusing on the important stuff. Denying us true rest.

At the start of this advent period, I realised there were two particular pieces of unresolved emotional clutter which were causing me distress, relating to my father’s death earlier this year. And these were actually things that were in my control – so, I needed to grasp the nettle and sort them out. They weren’t the nicest or easiest things to accomplish, but I can honestly say I felt better once they were ticked off the list. One of these issues involved chasing up an official department – I have sometimes been loath to do this in the past, thinking I should just wait my turn. Sometimes that absolutely is the most helpful thing to do for all concerned but, in this case, it was totally sensible and necessary for me to ring them up and get the resolution I so desperately needed.

It’s always good to do whatever we can to clear our emotional clutter – even if there are other things we need to learn to accept because it is not within our power to remove them.

I can’t clear all the clutter associated with my father’s death – that’s a complex process I need to honour, however long it takes. But there are still things I can do. I decided that a bit of ritual would be helpful to me as we officially entered the glitzy world of Christmas. So, I borrowed from a tradition I first started last New Year’s Eve. I wrote a note about the year that is drawing to a close:

“Well, 2023…you sorta

SUCKED

in a few big ways…

BUT

we have journeyed through it together

& have also had beautiful times.

Here’s to letting go of the old hurtful

things & journeying through advent with

Hope, Peace, Joy & Love

-

as well as lots of rest & fun!!!”

I read my note aloud to Simon, scrunched it up with a good deal of zeal, and then threw it onto the fire. We watched it burn in the beautiful, hypnotic flames.

I think there’s something extraordinarily powerful about rituals for human beings. Too often, I think people get put off rituals because they are associated with religion. That’s true – but they don’t have to be – you can create your own, to serve you, drawing upon traditions if that helps you.

This ritual helped me to formally acknowledge the pain I have lived through during the past six months. And it was valuable to watch that bit of paper go up in flames, which really encapsulated my feelings about letting go of what is past and journeying hopefully into a brighter future where those hurtful past things are no more than a memory…

Here’s to clearing our clutter so we can revel in the festive season!

P.S. If you're interested in finding out about my journey to heal and reclaim joy in Christmas after longstanding emotional abuse, my book - Reclaiming Christmas - is available at Amazon in ebook, paperback and audio versions. Spoiler alert - it has a happy ending!! You can find the Amazon links here: https://www.damselnotindistress.co.uk/books.