Irony?

I realized something that was interesting to me: after all of these posts about tidying and fat, those were the areas where I felt like I could never please my mother.

I don't want that to come off too harshly. Our relationship has been mostly good, but her parenting philosophy was that you need to correct children. Later I grew to understand that she didn't think I was as bad as I thought that she thought I was, but that took a while. Until some point in adulthood, I only really knew what was wrong with me.

(My father was actually a bigger part of that, and we will get there.)

It does seem like two different phenomena, because while I have learned to accept being fat, I haven't exactly accepted being disorganized. It is more complicated than that.

I am more mindful of whether certain things work well for me or not. I am sure there are organizational choices that my mother would not approve of, but the key issue has become whether or not it works for me. If it does, great; if not I will figure out what does work for me. 

I needed some room to get there, where my specific needs and wants could be sufficient justification.

In addition, I also needed to be able to let things go.

I had mentioned a while back about needing to be over-prepared, and that making it hard to travel light. 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2021/03/driven.html

That was not just one thing. My need to take care of everyone and do that perfectly is in there, but it was combined with a lack of trust that other people would come through, and also a scarcity mindset.

I have a specific childhood sense of being poor. I can't tell you whether that was just my specific formative time period. There are five year gaps between siblings on either side for me, so we did have different experiences regarding that. It might also just be something about me, with that whole sense of not being enough. We might have seemed poorer because of that.

Regardless, it made it hard to let things go. There was always the fear of needing it later and not having it, and the dread of being wasteful. Maybe there was concern that getting rid of something without having used it meant I never deserved it at all.

I don't doubt that it helps that there are so many better options for discarding responsibly now. Very little has to go directly into the garbage. Sometimes it requires some work to find the right method and destination, but it helps. 

It helps almost as much as it helps getting to be okay with yourself.