Decluttering my emotions

January is nearly over, but I’m still tearing the house apart. I keep finding more areas to declutter. In my last blog I talked about going in deep. Really question why you keep certain things.

Hit the discomfort zone and declutter there.

There’s a very good reason for this.

It’s not just your external world that you’re decluttering… it’s internal too.

We feel good when we clean our space.

We feel even better when we declutter.

But when we really address the baggage we have stored away… we address the emotional baggage that goes with it.

The emotional response can be quite overwhelming.

I’ve always had things neatly stored, both in my home and internally. This week I’ve ripped the lid off everything and thrown, tossed, faced and finally… let go.

I have cried. Boy have I cried. I’ve been surprised by the waves of emotions that have swamped me at times, for all sorts of things.

The passing of time.

The mistakes that I’ve made.

People I’ve lost.

The end of my first marriage.

The areas of my life I still haven’t healed, haven’t mastered… or simply haven’t addressed.

As my past came out of boxes, it came out of other places as well. A great aunt told me mind-blowing family secrets. My parents told me things that had never been voiced before. Generations of pain and secrecy have been released.

And healing has begun.

I opened boxes and I found letters and cards from my first husband. I cried for a lost love, eight years after it died. I’ve been able to place a few of these letters away for each of my sons. It’s their history now. And it’s a lovely history. It was a beautiful romance. It just died. I cried not because I held out hope but because enough time has passed now and I can finally see how wonderful that love was. That’s a healing.

I have laughed, and cried, and even felt like I was going to throw up. And as each bag of stuff gets tossed in the bin, there is space, both in this house, and inside me, that I haven’t felt before.