Mental Housecleaning

The last time I posted to this site, I committed to blogging at least once a month. That was almost five months ago. Since then, I've become increasingly frustrated by my lack of follow-through on this broken promise – a festering irritation that has grown into a literary black hole, consuming my will to read or write just about anything.

I know I'm being hard on myself. From February through April, I worked full-time as a tax preparer while finishing my Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Nonfiction. I also took on a co-chair role for a literary festival, assessed dozens of submissions for two writing contests, and participated in an online poetry panel. But while I spent my days immersed in numbers and my evenings buried in words, my to-be-read list grew alongside a mounting stack of commitments to provide feedback to other writers. And my own writing – beyond my MFA assignments – fell into the background of a thoroughly cluttered mind.

By the time I graduated and finished my first tax season, I was thoroughly exhausted and in dire need of a mental break. Fortunately, I was able to celebrate those milestones with two weeks in Denmark and Iceland, followed by a week in Halifax to attend my master's graduation. (Unfortunately, I brought a nasty cold home from Denmark and barely made it to my grad ceremony. But at least all those hours holed up in a hotel room gave me plenty of time to think.)

If you've been following my work over the past two years, you'll know that I'm writing a book about overwhelm: that pervasive feeling that we are all being stretched in too many directions. The more I've researched overwhelm, the more I've come to see my work as a personal journey. As the tagline on my site says, this blog is nothing more than "One writer's search for a simpler, more authentic life."

I've never claimed to master the simple life; I'm just determined to work toward it, and to share what I learn along the way. One of my biggest lessons so far is that simplicity is often found on the other side of complexity. For the 99%+ of us who are not prepared to quit society in a disappear-into-a-small-Latin-American-town-to-work-the-rest-of-your-life-in-a-cafe kind of way, simplification is hard work. In a maximalist world, the path to a simpler life requires us to shed, filter, and distill not only our material goods, but also our commitments, our communication channels, and even our beliefs. Harder yet, it requires us to do this against an onslaught of new information, demands, and stuff.

I've worked hard to curb my physical footprint over the past several years, downsizing into a reasonably small apartment with far less than the average amount of material goods. Now it's time for me to truly embrace mental contraction – that is, to reduce all those extraneous things that clutter my brain and my calendar. To clean up extra e-mail accounts, newsletter subscriptions, social media channels, and conversation threads. To be more selective about committing to volunteer work, joining online workshops, and attending community events.

This will be a tedious and painful process. It will mean saying no to things I want to say yes to. It will require me to organize, read, delete, sort, consolidate, and clean copious quantities of information – over and over again in an iterative process of letting go. Yet if past experiments in simplification have taught me anything, I can be quite certain that clearing mental space will also unlock my creativity. (So long as I don't go into this with specific expectations about how creatively productive I'll suddenly become.)

There have been times when I've considered dropping this blog – fitering it out as one of those unnecessary distractions from my "real" writing. But I intended this space as a scratch pad of sorts, and I'm not ready to give up on it yet. So if you're keen to hear how my mental decluttering process goes, please stay tuned and I'll try to report back soon. But this time I'm not making any promises.