Pre-PS: Our Monthly Workshop: The In-Between is happening this Thursday. It's for women who are exploring a shift in identity that hasn't yet landed. If that's you, join us here.
Hi, Reader.
There are moments that show you exactly how you’ve been living—whether you’re ready to see it or not. Decluttering, it turns out, is one of them.
Last night I decluttered every room in the house. I took everything out of every closet and laid it all bare, right there on the floor, so I could filter through it. I went through every piece of paper hiding in a drawer — including taxes from 2006. Every spice in the cabinet got organized into glass jars. Every piece of clothing found its new home.
But boy, what a mess the process can be. But that mess is how the process works.
Decluttering our home and decluttering our mind are similar processes. Before anything can be reorganized or released, it needs to come out of the closet first. It needs to be looked at, evaluated, and then chosen.
But most of us are raised to believe that whatever is deemed impolite or inappropriate must stay buried deep. The more we can control those feelings, the more civilized we are considered.
So we learn early on to stuff even more into an already overfull closet — to the point where the door won’t shut, and everyone can see the mess spilling out but we all pretend it ain’t so bad.
In the physical realm, the logic is clear: You can’t get rid of what you don’t know is hiding in the back.
The same is true for our internal world.
But there is a fundamental difference: Mental, emotional, and spiritual decluttering is often far more painful because we’re terrified of what we’ll find. We fear what it might mean about who we are, what we’ve done, how we’ve lived, or how others might react.
So instead of bringing things up to sort through them, we suppress them. We avoid the discomfort, feel overwhelmed by the potential mess, and, the worst part is, we convince ourselves we’re not capable of handling it.
This is how we create an internal double bind: when we don’t air things out and sort them through, they fester. They rot. And that shows up in ways we don’t always link to the original clutter, things like anxiety, depression, addiction, chronic exhaustion, disconnection. Most of us are dragging around emotional dead horses we haven’t named — and still wonder why we feel stuck.
The only way to loosen the double bind is to find a way to feel safe enough to tell the truth of your experience to yourself, decloak it fully, and choose — consciously — what stays and what goes.
But how often do we declutter what clutters our mind? Our body? Our beliefs? How often do we even think about our habits, thought patterns, and inherited scripts from 1977 that we’re still carrying?
So I’ll leave you with some questions. Take a few deep breaths, and ponder. Bonus points if you hit reply and tell me what comes up.
- How many outdated beliefs that you know no longer serve you are you still carrying? Can you name the first three that pop up?
- For what purpose do you continue to hold on to them? Is it to be polite? Not trigger your father-in-law? Keep up with tradition? Keep the peace? Stay in control? In other words — how does holding on to those outdated, potentially harmful beliefs actually serve you? Because on some level, it’s intelligent. Even if it’s no longer aligned. So how is it serving you? What does keeping them mean for you?
If you’re curious about self-exploration that has no answers yet, join us for our upcoming monthly workshop —
For women who can feel they no longer are who they were, but don’t yet know who they are becoming.
In this space together, we’ll explore identity, deconstruction of the old, and holding space for the new to emerge.
We’ll explore our inner world together through talking, writing, and guided reflections. My intention is to have us leave not with a plan, but a felt sense of possibility for what’s next.
Thursday January 22nd | 11 AM - 1 PM EST | Zoom | $49 CAD (free for members)