Why Eleven Forks?

I have always been a person who needs to purge. Once when I left the Big City, I put whatever I could fit into my tiny Toyota Truck (this was before Toyota named their trucks, and it was definitely before Toyota made any sort of *big* truck), put everything else on the sidewalk, and when I woke up the next morning, almost everything was gone. It was both horrifying and energizing. I got into my truck and drove away.

Insert some fast forward noises here. Twenty years later, I am quarantined in 1,000 square feet of very old house with two teens and a spouse and every motherlovin' thing any one of us has picked up and brought home in the past 20 years. And it was paralyzing. Truth.

I adore my family. They are quirky and fun and interesting, and not at all your bog-standard people. Me, too. I was quirky and fun and interesting - until I wasn't. Until life got hard. And I'm not talking super hard - just regular old hard. Sure, we have our issues - plenty of ASD and ADHD and processing speeds and sensory this and perseveration that and tics, and gender issues. And don't forget plain old puberty. So life was normal hard with average issues and everything was pretty much okay except that as the years went by, I started to think of myself as not being interesting anymore, and thinking I was lazy, not a good cook, a procrastinator. The messages I was sending myself were pretty fierce, but they slithered into my life so slowly I didn't notice them. And you know how this story goes, right? I soothed those feelings with food and things. I got fatter, and my house got fuller. But it was all with such good intent! We are not fancy people. The things I bought? Things I hoped would make our lives better. I am a collector, a maker, a treasure hunter, an adventurer!  And those traits had been overtaken by the messages I was sending myself. It just got worse and worse, and no matter what I did, it didn't get better. And then... there was a pandemic. 

Shit. You can't hide from yourself in a pandemic - can you? Sure you can! I coped in the only way I could (and honsetly, felt lucky to have a way to cope at all back in those first scary days) - by throwing myself into making masks. Did I mention ADHD? That one would include me. For better or worse, one of my ADHD traits is being all in or all out. And I could help people! People needed masks! I was ALL IN. For weeks; all day and all night I was in our barn at my sewing machine making masks. I would go to bed at 1 or 2 am and get up at 10 to start again. Did the kids eat? Maybe. Did the house get cleaned? Certainly not. Was there school? Well, they had to do their best. We all just had to do our best, right? So essentially, you see, for the first few weeks I completely checked out on my family. Then one day teen one says to me: Mom, you need to be here with us.

Full stop.

When your kid tells you you need to be there with them? The teen? Honestly I am glad she told me. I started spending days with the kids and nights still sewing until the wee hours. But when I was spending time with the kids, I wasn't, you know, doing parent things. I was watching tv with them. Playing Dragon Merge for endless hours. Doomscrolling. Throwing together sandwiches for dinner. It was bad. And it went on that way for a long time. Sometime in November, I was able to slow down my mask making. Not only were they now available in stores, but they were cheaper than I could make them. But that was okay, because we had to have Thanksgiving, and Christmas and New Years. How did any of us even pull that off? I'm amazed, honestly.

Which leads us to the beginning. My bff - let us call her Kitty O'Catterson - said "I'm going to do this house organizing challenge - will you be my accountability partner?" Well of course. And now that I am not making masks, and all those holidays are over and done with, I have time to do it. And here you must refer back to my all in tendency. In the past three months, my house has started to look better than it has in years. It started small - me throwing away most of the trial size toiletries that I would generally save because "what if we need them for travel?" And suddenly there was room in the drawer. 

A-ha! Do you see the lightbulb? It felt *good* to get rid of those things. It felt *amazing* to have room in the drawer. Thus encouraged, I continued on what would eventually become my journey to "enough". Because we have TOO MUCH. I always felt that if we lived in a normal size house, our stuff would have closets to reside in and we would not have such a mess. (Yeah. Old house, no closets. Don't get me started.) And weren't we *entitled* to a normal amount of stuff? Weren't we? Sure we were. But there was a price to pay for it. And guess what? I'm not paying that price anymore.

There are many, many minimalist bloggers and YouTubers and authors out there in the world. I am incredibly thankful that there are, because I need daily encouragement. Daily! So why did I start this blog? Does the world need another "minimalish" blog? Honestly? It's not for you - it's for me. Three months into this, I realized that I was having a lot of thoughts and feelings. Ideas. Questions. And writing helps me process. I have a stack of journals from my own teen and post teen years. I have always been a writer. And honsetly? I want to remember this journey, because I think it's going to be a good one. 

And Eleven Forks? I guess I will have to get to that later.