My life fell off the rails. Organizing my closet helped.

Sometimes my life completely falls off the rails. It often lines up with the week before my period, but not always. My medication either does nothing or causes me to hyperfocus on the wrong things. I fail to get my work done, and so I compensate by pulling late nights. As a result, the laundry doesn’t get done and the kitchen situation disintegrates. I stop cooking for myself, I fail to exercise, and I escape my life with Youtube instead of doing any of my healthy hobbies.

Last week in particular was hellish. My inability to work and the fetid state of my apartment led to a depressive spiral. I could not get out of bed. I couldn’t even take a shower. I wasn’t eating breakfast. I wasn’t working.

I knew I had to do something, but I didn’t know where to start. I forced myself to go to the gym, thinking that the happy-making endorphin rush I usually felt would kick in. It didn’t work though, and I left feeling just as low as when I walked in. I cleaned the kitchen, thinking it would allow me to at least have breakfast in the morning, but that didn’t help either.

Meanwhile my closet situation was becoming dire. I had boxes of winter clothes overflowing onto the floor. I had raided them because I was running out of clean summer clothes. There were piles of dirty clothes next to stuffed laundry baskets. And worst of all, the washing machine was filled with forgotten five-day-old wet clothes that had started to smell.

Finally, at the end of the week, I ran out of underwear. I had no choice but to do the laundry – all of it. In a last ditch effort to handle my shit, I dragged three weeks of dirty laundry to the laundromat to wash and dry everything at once. My washing machine at home is a tiny combined washer/dryer unit that would have taken a week to finish the job. I stayed at the laundromat for 2.5 hours while my clothes were getting washed and dried, chatting on the phone with my boyfriend the entire time (love him for that).

When I got home, I hung/folded every garment while still hot. I put away any item that added complexity to my life: shorts/skirts/tanks that required me to shave, colors that were difficult to style, and anything out of season.

The next morning, the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was my neatly organized closet. It looked and felt amazing. All the clothes were hung up before wrinkles could set in, crisp and clean. I could see a dozen cute outfits at a glance. I felt excited to get dressed again. I felt like getting out of bed again.

Things went a lot smoother that morning for me. Not perfect of course, but I was able to get up, get dressed, and leave for lab. Massive progress.

With ADHD, when things get extremely hard, it becomes necessary to focus on just one thing at a time and let go of all judgement. I learned that my closet is the root of my chaos, and focusing on fixing it was so incredibly effective.

I never would have thought that my clothes would have such an impact on my well-being. I suppose getting dolled up is a huge confidence boost each day. It is a creative and tactile process and I think I lost that bit of daily joy when I let my closet fall apart. It’s also a process that requires many decisions and lends itself to judgements and mental pit-falls. When my closet is neat and streamlined, it becomes a much more compassionate process again.

I think managing ADHD requires self-awareness and self-acceptance. By acknowledging that our lives will fall apart from time-to-time, and by learning how to put it back together again, we can get back on track faster.

What is the origin of your chaos?