Get Organized: Room Cleaning

This past week, my uncle, cousin, and her two children came to stay with us for Thanksgiving, which of course meant that I had to give up my room. This is how it's always been, whenever we have house guests they stay in my room because I am the only one out of my two siblings who has their own bathroom. Unfortunately, this also means that whenever company is coming, it puts me into a mad dash to clean my room. For someone who keeps almost all other aspects in their life in complete order, I've never understood why I allow my room to get so out of hand. But I do, and it's always a mess, but at least it's my mess. There is always order within the disorder that is my room and I have a constant general sense of where exactly everything is. I've found that when I do attempt to organize my room, I often end up outsmarting my self and putting things in logical, smart places, but then later forget where those places were. So as I was cleaning my room, a good three hour task, I got to look at all the ways that my past self was smarter than my current self, and all they ways that it was less intelligent as well. 

I'm usually apprehensive before starting an organizational project because I know it will lead to frustration and eat up a good deal of time, but I always end up really enjoying myself because I actually love to sort things. I enjoy putting things in places and making them look nice , and afterwards I constantly have a sense of accomplishment because I know that everything is where it should be. Then that sense of accomplishment turns into anger as I frantically search to find things I've hidden away from judgmental house guest eyes. Sometimes  I just don't understand why I do the things I do. I have no idea why I there is a tub full of every paper and handout I received last school year sitting under my desk, but there it is, quietly mocking me. Nor do I know why I have a drawer full of dance stuff when I always forget that I put my dance things in there and then end up having a panic attack before performances because I can't find any of it, even though it's all neatly stored away. It's amazing how rational and idiotic I can be at the exact same time.

One of the things I realized while cleaning was that I hold onto things for far longer than I should. This is probably one of my worst habits, because it just leads to excess clutter and my room being filled with bizarre things I haven't touched in ages. It's so hard for me to throw things away because I always get that terrifying, nagging question, "but what if I need it?"I constantly seem to come up with the most absurd justifications for keeping things I shouldn't, and then just end up feeling claustrophobic in my prison full of junk.  I need to learn to let things go and stop living my life in hypothetical "What if's". There is a time and a place for everything, and  a good majority of the things I own have lost their time, so therefore they must now lose their place. 

In conclusion, cleaning my room has shown me that I need to be more logical and less, for lack of a better word, stupid. Probably in all aspects of life, but especially in the state of my room.
 

Metacognition: Writing for fun

This year, thus far, has been a year of trial and error. It is always challenging to start a new class with a new teacher because you have to learn the teachers style and adapt your writing to suit their criteria. Different instructors look for different things and especially in high school, it always feels like you need to write more for a grade than for yourself. Which sounds odd, because of course you would want an A on an assignment but often times I feel like personal discovery is lost in school writing. I know that personally I have written many papers that I was very proud of and excited to turn in but never got very good grades on, and then there were assignments where I didn't believe a single thing I had written and hated every arbitrary word of the paper, but I would get a great grade on them.

However, this year feels different. I have never written a blog before this year in English and when we were first told about the assignment I wasn't so sure about it. I figured that it would just be another tedious project that added more stress and work to my life, but I was wrong. I've found that with every blog I write, I begin to enjoy writing more and more. I had forgotten was it was like to write for me and not my teacher. Especially now that we are older and understand, or at least are starting to understand, how to write well, we can start to play with the rules. Writing is fun and we need to remember that, not everything has to be a 20 page thesis research essay, and not everything has to be dry and boring. Mr. Allen reminded us that we can start a sentence with "but" and we can use "and" more than once because writing is all about craft. We can enjoy the things we write and craft them the way we want because that's the point of writing, to put into words our personal discoveries in a way that keeps them in their truest form. 

From the beginning of the school year until now I have remembered what it feels like to write for me, and not a teacher. Even though these blogs are technically for a grade, it doesn't feel like it because we get to write about, with some parameters, whatever we want. They allow us to write about what we find interesting and what we enjoy, which in turn allows us to enjoy that which we have written. I get excited now when we are assigned a blog post because I know it means that I will get to write for personal gain and exploration. Honestly, I feel like I have had more mental breakthroughs this year, than any other year before, because I am getting the chance to fully explore my thoughts. Of course this could be a dangerous thing if taken to the extreme and writing becomes all fun and no substance, so it is important to find a balance. But nonetheless, I fully intend to carry this lesson with me as I go through life, writing is fun and should be something that brings you joy, not stress.