The first breakthrough.

Well...I wouldn't necessarily call it a breakthrough but it's at least a first step.  I need to live my life by the Nike slogan "Just Do It".  It is difficult to understand how important this is unless you've walked in my shoes for a few days, or at least had a struggle similar to mine.  Enter my incredible husband.  You see, I was beginning to be bothered by the facebook conversation that was happening all about my seeming inability to unpack boxes (and in my estimation be generally productive).  I was trying to figure out why I was so bothered with it because nothing that was said was mean or rude or even off color really.  It was all true and mostly an attempt to be helpful in one way or another.  People were being supportive and giving suggestions and encouragement and yet...I was bothered.  This puzzled me so I was trying to figure it out by verbally processing with my husband.  Jacob figured it out for me because it is similar to things that he deals with on a daily basis.  It comes down to simply this...fear.

Now, I know how weird that sounds.  "How can anyone be afraid of unpacking a box, or cleaning a desk, or vacuuming a room?" you might ask.  I would have asked the same thing until tonight.  You see, when I talk about how overwhelming things look to me and that I don't even know where to begin it really comes down to fear.  I'm not afraid of what I'll be cleaning or what I might find, I'm not even afraid to do the task itself, I'm just afraid.  It's like...hmm...how shall I attempt to explain this where I won't sound crazy?  Okay, everything that I need to do is something small and simple.  However, in my mind, for whatever reason, each of those things is GIGANTIC AND INSURMOUNTABLE!!!  And here's the kicker:  it's not that everything put together looks overwhelming to me as I've always thought, it's each individual thing that must be done that is daunting...so imagine the sheer terror I feel when looking at all of the HUGE things that culminate into something completely undoable!!  I'm not turning a lot of little molehills into mountains, rather, I am turning a lot of mountains into the freaking Swiss Alps!!  It's not like any of these things are actually huge and truly daunting...that's just how I perceive them for some reason.

So, the point of all of this rambling is that I managed to hack my way through a significant amount of what I deemed impossible to accomplish things tonight.  My husband talked to me about how to tackle this sort of thing because it is the sort of fear he has to tackle on a daily basis and the best thing to do is to just do it...hence, Nike.  It seems much simpler in writing.  It's not a get off your butt and unpack a box mentality because that clearly doesn't work, has never worked, and likely will never work with me.  This is something much deeper that I can't quite put into words but it is something I've struggled with my entire life.  He told me that the way to handle it is to pick a single task and tell myself that I'm going to just do it and that it's not going to kill me and I don't have to be afraid of it and I don't have to do anything else, just that one thing.  Wow, it seems so silly when I write it down.  I really can't explain how huge this is to me and I feel stupid for even writing it because it is something that seems like such a "duh" thing to everyone else but it's really not.  I'm never going to be able to explain this without people thinking I'm retarded so whatever.  The point is, I managed to clean the desk (I mean really clean, and organize), unpack two boxes that likely would have been two boxes I would have purposefully avoided due to the contents (random stuff that I had to figure out what the heck to do with it...not nearly as scary as I made it out to be in my head), clear off the TV stand (that doesn't actually have a TV on it since we don't own one but is where we put the box fan so it's in front of the window), and vacuum the papazan chair as well as the living room (okay, so I had to vacuum around the boxes I still haven't gotten to but one step at a time here people).

The papazan chair is a significant victory to me because I started with cleaning the cat hair off of it with this brick thing that I have that I love for pet hair but it wasn't clean enough.  Normally I would have just said, "that's good enough," and left it but I got out the vacuum and used the pet brush thing to vacuum it.  Then, to top it off, there were crumbs and what not in the little crevices of the cushion and I again would have thought, "well I'll do that later," but instead I put a different attachment on the hose and vacuumed the crap out of that thing.  If I had actually put it off for later it likely would never have gotten done the entire time we lived here.  Okay, I admitted to it...it's in writing, moving on.  I know it only took like an extra 10 seconds to change the attachment and really clean the thing but it is not something I would normally do so it was quite a cool thing for me.  I am airing my dirtly laundry here...showing myself in all of my glorious weakness.  Wow.

Well, there you have it, another step on what looks like it will be a long but worthwhile journey.  Take it how you will.