God bless my mother

God bless my mother, she’s helping me clean house. Specifically the two rooms that I have my stuff in since I’ve been halfway living out here for the last nine months. She’s trying to organize things so that I can get to my stuff more easily. For that, I am grateful. The part that makes me really nervous about these reorganization projects is that you have to move, rearrange, throw away, and potentially lose precious things forever in the process. In other words, it gets a lot worse before it gets better. That gives me anxiety that I can hardly stand, as a matter of fact. The only redeeming quality of these types of projects is that you may end up rediscovering things you thought you’d never see again or forgot you had from the last time you went through this process. In short, I can’t stand to watch, so I’m in the living room blogging and waiting for my mom to tell me she needs help getting things back on the shelves or taken out so she can throw them away. I just took some more of my prescription anxiety medication, which should be kicking in shortly. That will help, I hope. I started out putting on a good show of false bravado, but quickly gave that up once Mom got the trash sack out and began going through some of those precious things that are clearly old and need to be “retired”, but hold that nostalgic value that all old things do. I love my mom, and she’s good at organizing. I’m not good at traditional organization — I have more of a “piles” sense of organization. I know which pile what is in and where in the pile it is as long as nobody messes with the pile. I come by that honestly, as that is the exact system of organization that my dad used. And yes, it drives most people nuts. It’s not as if they are messy piles, though. My piles are carefully balanced and neat so that nothing in them gets squished, bent, or ruined, because I’m more than a little bit of a perfectionist about that. Although I wasn’t this disorganized before I had PTSD, I certainly am now, and it shows in the “urban sprawl” of my piles when you enter a space that I spend any time at all in. My mom had a gentle talk with me about the couch in the living room about three weeks ago. It’s only a few layers deep with stuff at the moment… So, what can I say — I have issues. My mom is very patient and I work very hard to contain my piles, or at least keep them out of sight and out of the way. My mom has her own piles, but they look much neater than mine. God bless my mother.