The junk drawer crashed to the floor, spilling its contents over square footage of my entire kitchen.
Out of what I can only assume was spite and maliciously poor timing, the silver knob of the junk drawer had caught snugly in the pocket of the jacket tied around my waist. I whipped around and felt the pull of the drawer on its tracks, the tug of my jacket behind me, and I quickly calculated the risk of acute back injury if I tried to gymnastics my way into saving it from its impending fall.
My lumbar region silently thanked me as I stared at the pile of, well, junk that had amassed on the floor.
My mind, a little numb after a difficult morning raising volatile tweens and a senile six-year-old, spun mercilessly like the Big Wheel on The Price is Right. I was a final contestant at the Showcase Showdown of emotions, and the 20-sided Big Wheel was boop-boop-booping dangerously close to “ugly-crying” and “rage-arson” (I believe it landed on “foggy and numb, go get a Coke Zero and a cookie from Crumbl”).
I sat cross-legged on my dirty floor, watching out for errant nails and thumbtacks that could prove risky to my derriere. Tape, old batteries, probably about 37 lip balms (I have a problem shut up about it), capless markers, a now-cracked thermometer, a stick of tropical-smelling deodorant, and every Allen wrench I’d ever used to assemble some swear-worthy piece of IKEA furniture obstructed my vision, my expectation of normalcy.
All my junk was visible.
Have you ever really thought about the contents of your junk drawer? For months (yeah okay years), my useful and useless had shared the same dark space, had been relegated to a place without definition, tangled in each other’s wires and cords, stuck to the backs of wrinkled post-it notes.
The useful and useless now lay scattered in the open, visible for me to choose its purpose.
I sort through the items, separating them into what to keep and what to send to the recycle bin (and the landfill, you are so welcome Mother Earth).
I re-home the junk drawer, filled with items like long lighters for candles (and arson, if the possibility occurs), my collection of small tools, a few pens.
Homeless remnants litter the floor. I sweep broken objects, Tetanus-loving nails, old bobby pins, a felt Santa?, and sticky hands that had lost the sticky into a dustpan and empty its contents into the garbage.
Clean.
Free from the useless, from the garbage cluttering my spaces, from the burden of dead weight.
And it’s not lost on me:
My mind is a junk drawer, weighed down by homeless, leftover thoughts that need a place to stay.
Useless, dominant thoughts whisper,
“You’re not enough, Kiera.”
“You don’t belong here.”
“You have to be perfect to be loved, didn’t you know that?”
Negative energy, fears, perfectionism, rejection, and inadequacy clutter the space inside me, and what hurts the most is that
I let them in.
I let these useless thoughts flirt and manipulate, let them wrap themselves around the power in me, let them abuse the neuroplasticity that gives me strength, that teaches me to grow.
In my ignorance, I hadn’t noticed just how quickly I had become so overrun with nonessentials and burdened by figuratively broken and bent objects, with anxiety that now plasters itself as propaganda on the walls of my cerebrum.
So much useless has taken up so much space.
And so I’m sweeping them up. The outcome is not immediate, of course. Sweeping up the trash takes time and practice. Clearing the cobwebs of resiliency and self-compassion requires ME to give it habitual and active participation.
But I will.
The space in my mind is a much higher rent than it used to be.
