Amy Lu's View

Yesterday I started cleaning out my office–my worksite office from the Before Times. 

I feel overwhelmed. 

I love working at home and feel very fortunate to be able to do so, but the process of getting from “Before” to “After” is daunting. I just don’t feel like I can deal with more stuff in my life. And I mean material, tangible, physical stuff. 

Chad and I have put a lot of time and effort this year into decluttering, and now here I am, with more clutter from work. 

To once again quote my beloved character Claire that I got to play in many versions of the play “Broken Hill”:

“It’s ocean sediment, burying me, I gotta shovel it out, and suddenly all the space I cleared is filled with more stuff than ever.”

–Claire from the play “Broken Hill” by Jim Lundy

Okay, I may be in an overly dramatic mood. I actually didn’t even have that much stuff in my office because I wasn’t there that long before Covid hit and we started working from home. I made a big purge of my work possessions around two and a half years ago when I did the cube to office move and just didn’t have time to accumulate more stuff. (And before that I made a had a big cube excavation chronicled here: Do Fear The Platypus).

I didn’t even find any weird or gross food stashes–although I did throw out a couple of granola bars and individually wrapped pieces of chocolate which I now kind of regret doing because Chad said we would have eventually consumed those. 

And yes, I did try to be ruthless in my recycling and purging. If I had things that I hadn’t looked at or used in a year and a half, I didn’t need it, right?

So what did I find and keep?

• Racing medals–no surprise, I knew that despite having brought several of them home when I got my new laptop, I still had many hanging up on my bulletin board. 
  • I was a little surprised by the “Sweating makes you look hot” sign that my awesome friend Stephanie made and held while cheering me on during my first marathon. I had forgotten about that and left it at my office to try and buy more time to come up with a plan for it.
• Mugs–I love mugs, and I love work-related mugs.
• An afghan my dad won in Nursing Home Bingo
• My Twenty Year Employee Recognition Certificate (this actually was delivered while I was gone) and several miscellaneous certificates for trainings and work awards
• Binders of training. Yes, many of these training materials I did recycle because they were obviously out-of-date, but it seems like I should at least skim the managerial and leadership topics.
  • And speaking of binders–I still could not part with my binder full of storytime fingerplays and songs, which I will probably never ever use again.

I didn’t finish cleaning out my office, but I didn’t expect to. I knew this would be a challenging  task (if not actually that time consuming) so planned for it to take at least two sessions. 

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It’s been weighing on my mind enough that I dreamed about cleaning out my office the other night, only in my dream my office morphed into my dorm room and I had lots of clothes to deal with.

Thankfully no clothes were hidden away in my office, but in addition to all the physical possessions and artifacts I’ve been focused on, there were some emotions, too. As I’ve said, this is a very welcome change for me, but it’s still a significant transition, and it was weird and a little melancholy to make it by myself in a mostly empty environment. Well, at least empty of people–there were lots of boxes and binders and more boxes. 

On the upside, feelings don’t need to be organized and don’t take up any physical space (unless I really lean in to eating mine) and I have a super cute and cuddly furry coworker to help me process them. (Just to avoid any ambiguity, I am referring to StanLee, not Chad).