Yesterday I cleaned out my closet and it felt kind of like writing does. A few months ago, I came back home to live in the house I grew up in. As a teenager, I never cleaned my room. Boxes of art supplies were stacked up against dressers, books scattered all of the floor, a hamper full of clothes permanently sitting in a corner. I got used to stepping around the piles of stuff. I never sat at my desk because the surface was cluttered with mountains of papers and pens and paperbacks and quarters and pennies. But when I came back to live here, I was so depressed that I finally got the urge to clean, a last resort to feel something kind of thing. It was invigorating. I realized what people do to cope with life. People organize their living spaces and throw out old stuff, they wash dishes and do laundry often. Yesterday I cleaned out my closet for the first time ever and filled up two garbage bags that were the size of me. A distinct sense of peace permeated me as I moved back and forth from the closet to the living room (where I was tossing all this stuff). It’s the sensation I feel while writing. It’s hard to believe that writing doesn’t require any movement. I loved the way I had to reach into crevices, step up on a chair, crawl to pick up discarded receipts and wristbands off the floor. It’s what writing feels like. It feels like digging through your closet but it’s never-ending. You step in and sift through the items of your past. You put them in boxes and assign them a place on the shelf. You choose what each item sits next to. You choose what to scrap, what’s no longer needed. You come across so many things you forgot about, things that surprise you. For a moment, nothing else exists but this physical task, kind of like yoga. There’s immense pleasure in both keeping things and getting rid of things. I got sad while I was doing it because I realized at a certain point I’d be done. But then I remembered that through life you accumulate more things and eventually have to clean again.
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