It's 2:30 p.m. on the Wednesday before Christmas, and I'm tearing around my home office, madly throwing things away. In my office, this is a novel thing -- "cluttered" is the tip of the iceberg, baby -- but I have no choice. A personal organizer is due to arrive any minute.
Her name is Susannah Coneybeare, and she's a friend, a former casting director with whom I once took a TV writing course. Now, she runs her own organizing service, The Sorting House, and gets paid $60 an hour to help people throw things away. With me, she has her work cut out for her.
It's not that I like clutter, which in my case is mostly piles of paper arrayed in a mysterious matrix that I alone can understand. It's just that it doesn't bother me enough to put in the hours it would take to fix it. I know where everything is, more or less, and can find everything I need, eventually. And it's only my office that's affected; the rest of my house is tidy by anyone's standards, excluding my mother's.
It's partly that my fine mind is occupied with more important things, and partly that I feel order is overrated, like punctuality. It smells faintly of fascism. I dislike how everyone these days seems to want their bedrooms to resemble anonymous hotel rooms, or their living rooms to look like the display shelves at Caban. I like more colour, more variety, more personality.
I disdain uber-minimalists such as Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, who used to prowl the glass-walled offices of his magazine empire and scream at editors whose desks were "messy" (i.e., had more than one thing on them at a time). Or the New York headquarters of Calvin Klein Inc., where a memo was circulated last July requiring all desks to conform to "the Calvin Klein brand aesthetic." Employees were instructed not to display any photos, awards or even flowers, other than white ones. If an employee was so tacky as to have received coloured flowers, she was told to take them home. Approved accessories would have made Himmler proud: black desks, black three-ring binders, black mechanical pencils and black Uniball Micro pens. With black ink. Interestingly, employees' file folders could run wild -- they could be black or white.
I, on the other hand, have coloured file folders, lots of them. With files in them, dating back to . . . 1994. Well, they are a tad crowded, I confess. And sometimes it does take me a bit longer to find things than is strictly productive. But mainly I've hired Susannah because the clutter is getting on the nerves of my husband -- a king of order compared with no one but me -- and some of my friends have begun chiding me ever so subtly.
At 3 p.m. on the dot, Susannah arrives -- organized, punctual and, oh dear, bearing liquor boxes (empty, alas) and a label maker. I give her the full-on humiliation tour, revealing to her my Zone of Shame: toppling piles of interview tapes, stacks of appointment diaries, old scripts, things to file, letters to answer.
I am determinedly nonchalant -- this is all so no-big-deal, I emote -- and she smiles throughout, blessedly non-judgmental.
"So you've seen worse?" I finally squeak.
"That's the first question everyone asks," she replies, laughing. "Everyone wants me to have seen worse."
If she were not a friend, I would accept this charming answer and move on. Instead, I bend her arm behind her back until she squeals. Of course she's seen worse; she's seen whole houses crammed so full that they become mazes, with only narrow paths from room to room. She's seen people holding on by a thread, who as long as they keep one place organized -- one kitchen cupboard, say, or a bedroom closet -- can function. She's worked with people so overwhelmed by stuff that they no longer invite friends over. For these people, who are often rendered inert by their shame, she hires a team of sorters and a dumpster. (Suddenly my three liquor boxes are looking pretty hopeful.) Yet she is as non-judgmental of them as she is of me.
"People assume that everyone not only should be organized, but is capable of it," she says. "That it's innate. But it's not. The danger is when it starts to snowball. When it goes from one room to one floor to a whole house, when the clutter overwhelms a person's ability to live a normal life."
To prepare for Susannah, I had interviewed Hellen Buttigieg, a former personal organizer turned TV personality. She hosts the half-hour HGTV series Neat, which begins its second season tonight -- that is, she helps people throw things away too, but on television. Every person on her show mentions the word "stress." They're "stressed out by clutter;" they dream of "an inviting home." For the consultations, Buttigieg wears tidy skirts and blouses and heels, and then for the purging sessions changes into workout wear. (I love that.)
But a workout is exactly what it is, Buttigieg said: Sorting through one's life is exhausting, mentally and physically. "People keep things for a few main reasons. No. 1 is fear. They think, 'What if I need it some day? If I don't have it, I'll suffer.'
"The second reason is procrastination," she continued. "Usually an action is attached to an item -- you get a newsletter about a seminar you want to take, and instead of either registering for it or deciding not to right away, you put off the decision. But you hang onto the newsletter." I flushed, thinking about my dusty heap of just such items.
"The third reason is emotion. We attach emotions to items -- a gift a friend gave you, something your grandmother left you, something your mother made. Even if you don't like the item, you hang onto it because of the feeling attached to it."
On Buttigieg's show, people often unearth things that reduce them to tears -- for one woman, it's a shrivelled-up wreath from her father's funeral; for another, her childhood bedroom set. "The first day of any cleanout is a mourning day," Buttigieg said. "A lot of emotional baggage comes up." But the second day, she claims, is about elation, "freeing yourself of stuff that had, consciously or not, been weighing you down."
Back in my office, Susannah tells me that mine is a pretty typical case of functioning clutter. "Academics, writers, doctors -- people who live in their heads tend to hold onto paper," she says. "Paper is knowledge."
She tells me about one woman who had hundreds of boxes of documents and clippings all over her house. She never looked at them, but she could not bring herself to throw them away.
"Because she'd spent her life collecting them," Susannah says. "So if we could simply throw them out, then her life's work had been for nothing. Of course, that's an extreme example. For most people, I just ask, 'Do you have a system for saving that, or do you have a room where you close the door and hide it?' "
In my office, Susannah addresses each piece of furniture and mound of debris, always asking the same gentle questions: "Tell me about this. How do you use it? Do you need it to be here on the floor?"
My first thought is that I just need more filing cabinets, but Susannah says no (and Buttigieg agrees): The first step is purging. She sits by my side, holding one piece of paper after another under my nose, until I agree to pitch it or file it. It's surprisingly easy -- within seconds, I'm throwing away stuff by the ream -- but deadly dull. "Oh, I get it," I say. "I don't do this because I don't like to do it. It's boring me to tears."
"Yeah, a lot of people just get up and walk away," Susannah says, holding up more paper. "How about this? Do you need it? Why?"
I realize it's just like having a personal trainer or a book club or a walking partner -- to face any onerous task, you need to make some kind of deal with someone who forces you into it.
So why does my generation have such a hard time coping with stuff? Our parents would find such helplessness pathetic. (I admit, it is wonderfully ironic to watch a TV show about throwing things away, punctuated by commercials to buy new things.)
Buttigieg claims we simply have more of it. "We get more mail in a month than our parents got in a year," she said. "New gadgets come out that make our old ones obsolete -- VCRs, DVDs, iPods, MP3s --but we don't discard the old ones because they were expensive. And we were schooled by our parents that throwing things out is wrong. Sometimes we need permission to purge."
Susannah adds that we have an environmental awareness our parents didn't -- we know that nothing is ever really thrown away. "People like to know where their things are going," she says. "They want them to go to friends or Goodwill or to be recycled, and not just thrown in the trash."
It's also a process: "Things from your recently deceased mother, or a gift from your ex-husband that reminds you of when things were nice -- those are hard to part with," she says. "But in a year it could be easier. In the meantime, try to give everything a home, and make some time every day to put things away."
After three hours, we're getting down to the hardest stuff, odd bits and pieces, mementos, things I need to glue. "But these things are here precisely because I don't know what to do with them!" I moan. Susannah smiles blissfully and hands them to me one by one until they're sorted: To Do, To File, To Recycle, To Pitch.
I have found the process embarrassing, grimy and educational. I learned: 1) I do not deal with stuff that makes me feel guilty (tasks I really should address), that scares me (alarming documents about taxes), or that I think I ought to value but don't (gifts that I don't like but know are expensive); 2) throwing away things is fun; 3) about 90 per cent of the people who hire organizers are women; men think they'll get around to it themselves; 4) professional organizing is really intimate work -- I mean, these chicks see all.
After five hours, my office has a drawer full of neatly labelled files that actually have space in them, a brand-new recycling box and a heap of my husband's misplaced stuff that I can gloat about. I have a refreshing feeling of lightness, and a cleaning lady who is ecstatic -- she can vacuum in here at last! And I have eight boxes stuffed with dead paper. These Susannah carries out to the curb herself, before I get any ideas.
Neat's new season launches tonight on HGTV at 10:30 p.m., 1:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. For more air times, check local listings or visit http://www.neattv.com.
Susannah Coneybeare can be reached through The Sorting House, 416-686-3924. To find an organizing consultant near you, consult your Yellow Pages or visit http://www.organizersincanada.com.
Johanna Schneller