From the Editor’s Desk: Groundhog Day (Premium)

My life has turned into a real-life version of the movie Groundhog Day, where I’m repeating the same events over and over again and feel like I’ve lost any sense of control. The themes will be familiar if you’ve been reading along with these editorials and some of my article series this year. And so I apologize if this seems repetitive to you as well. Eventually, the room will stop spinning. At least I hope so.

This has been a big year for me, both personally and professionally. And when I look back on 2023, I suspect that what I will remember most clearly is selling our home and moving to an apartment, the massive decluttering effort that ensued as a result, becoming the owner of Thurrott.com, and the proactive steps I took to take control of my health.

The latter two are not milestones but rather ongoing concerns: There are always things to fix and improve with the site, no surprises there, and whatever I’m doing with regard to my weight and overall health is a long-term proposition with long-term implications. But thanks to some recent events, those first two items, both related, are giving me that sense of déjà vu. It’s all happening again.

When we moved to our current apartment, it was partially an experiment to see whether we could get by with just two bedrooms. And while we would have preferred more space, we ended up liking this apartment, the complex, and the people here, and the little town we moved to, much more than expected. We had to inform the place by the end of last week if we were going to renew our lease, and heading into September, we intended to do just that and then take it year-by-year.

But as is the case so often, life intervened. Sharon, the woman I refer to as my stepmother, and the mother of three of my sisters, has sadly developed some health issues and will now be moving in with one of these sisters who lives in the area. We bought our previous house from Sharon, at which point she bought and moved into a condo just one road over. And because my sisters intended to rent out that condo to help pay for Sharon’s increased medical costs, they asked us if we were interested.

All things being equal, I’d rather stay where I am. But they’re family and we want to help, and the logistics make sense: The condo is much bigger than this apartment and has that third bedroom, which would give me a formal office space again plus room for both kids when they visit, as will be the case over the holidays. And the cost is about the same as we’re paying now. And so we agreed. And just like that, we’re moving. Again.

The previous move happened quickly, too quickly, and despite our years of downsizing and decluttering work, we were struck by how much clutter we brought with us. The house we moved out of was about 3600 square feet, which is big, but there was also at least another 1,500 square feet of storage space between the basement and garage. And as I’ve often observed, moving roughly 5,000 square feet of stuff into a 1000-square-foot apartment is an interesting challenge. Fortunately, the apartment complex we came to has inexpensive on-site storage, which we use for furniture that won’t fit in here, some boxes, Christmas decorations, and the like.

But that move also inspired me to begin what became a massive decluttering campaign spanning both the physical and the digital. What I discovered was that I had spent a lifetime of not truly cleaning but rather organizing and hiding, something that’s now called doom piling. This is an “out of sight, out of mind” coping strategy, I guess, and so I resolved to overcome that by leaving the physical junk out where we could see it. Hopefully, that would get us to actually address it for good.

And we made some progress. I don’t like the word proud, but I will say that I was happy, and remain happy, with the digital decluttering work that I did in August and September in particular, which included getting rid of lots of paper-based items that needed to be scanned and organized digitally. I never expected to finish organizing my documents archive, which encompasses both personal and work-related material, let alone make such incredible strides elsewhere, but I did. And some of that work continues, though it has slowed for all the usual reasons. And this new reason.

As with our move to Pennsylvania six years ago, we have time before we have to move. This gives my sisters the time they need to get Sharon’s items out of the condo, and it gives us time to move in a more efficient manner than we did earlier this year. And so we spent most of this past weekend “pre-moving,” as I think of it, a process that involved identifying the things we could move now that are in our apartment and in storage, organizing and staging it, and then carting it in a rented U-Haul to the condo, where we have a room set aside for this. We made three trips, two on Saturday and one on Sunday, and I’ll be paying for that work in the form of stiffness and pain for a few days, totally worth it.

But there was an unexpected hitch as we started pulling things out of closets and storage areas. And it has cast a shadow over the success I felt in the wake of decluttering purge.

“I think these bins are yours,” my wife said from the storage closet across from the kitchen, an area of this apartment that I rarely visit or even think about. I was confused. “What?”

“There are three of your bins in this storage rack,” she responded.

Oh no.

We have two white IKEA storage racks that hold several bins each, and I used both in my office at the house. Since the apartment has less space, I’ve only been using one of them here, and we put the other one in the kitchen storage closet, where my wife used it to organize infrequently needed kitchen items. And … to my broken brain, it was like it no longer existed. I forgot all about it.

But considering this unit anew, with our kitchen accouterments all removed and packed in boxes by my wife, my shame was laid bare. Sure enough, there were three of my colored bins in the bottom row of the storage rack in the storage closet. And as I pulled each out, in turn, I suddenly realized my mistake. Oh, right. The first bin held just a small collection of loose electronics, nothing serious, and there were a few items there I had been wondering about. The second contained a paper grocery store bag full of items to scan, because of course it was. And the third held a set of photo books from 1986. Now, these I had scanned, years ago. But I must have kept them around for a reason. And so I would need to consider rescanning them if the quality I can get now is better than that of the original scans. Yet another item for the to-do list.

Sigh.

I really did think I was “done” with scanning and for a miraculous week or so, I was able to hold that success in my head. But I also knew there would always be more to do, and I did have this nagging feeling in the back of my brain that the pile of papers I had scanned over that miraculous long weekend, while voluminous in its own right, didn’t quite feel like all of it. And now the proof of that vague worry sat exposed on the floor, mocking me.

And just like that, the success I had felt from the previous two months of decluttering felt somehow lessened. It shouldn’t: I really did get a lot done, much more than expected. But there is more to do. And I will do it. Just not now, because I still need to finish up the decluttering work I started. And thanks to the move, and a coming three-week trip to Mexico City in late October and early November, I decided to simply pack up all that clutter and, yep, move it again to the next place. This bugs me because this is the pattern I’m trying to not keep repeating.

The one difference is that I won’t just let this go for some number of months or years this time, will let the successes continue. When we get back from Mexico, we will move from this apartment to the condo. I’ll have my own office, almost too much space, really, in sharp contrast to my current space. And I will leave that clutter out where I will see it, and I will deal with it. And then I really will be done, I guess. I’m afraid to even predict such a thing now, given how this all transpired.

But that’s the new plan. Because life. Round and round we go.