I'm a perfectionist in recovery

I’m not a slob; I’m a perfectionist in recovery.
I came up with that little gem the other night while listening to an audio book were a therapist described herself as a perfectionist in recovery. I think I’ll plaster it on some T-shirts and bumper stickers and make a little money on the side. I hereby proclaim copyright to the phrase and will file the necessary paperwork just as soon as I can find it on my desk.
There once was a time when I was so much the perfectionist that if it were true that a clean desk is a sign of a sick mind, my mind would be the unhealthiest place on earth, or at least at the level of a two-day-old tuna fish sandwich on a hot summer day.
I’m a packrat by nature, but an organized one. As a boy, I had a very cluttered room. Not a messy clutter, just a room overflowing with stuff. I kept my action figures and models neatly displayed on stands or in dioramas on my bookshelf. My walls were plastered with posters, but in an orderly fashion. I’m anal to the point of trying to keep various objects straight and neat and in order.
If I didn’t have room for something, I placed it in an organized pile. Those piles were my variation of an in-box of things to do later. Eventually, later would come and the pile would be dispatched with each item in its proper place.
Flash forward to adulthood and wouldn’t you know it, I married a fellow packrat. Together we are raising a brood of little packrats. Our house sometimes has the feel of a storage unit on steroids. We haven’t been able to park a vehicle in a garage since midway through the second Bush administration.
When you take two packrats and put them together – each coming from a previous marriage and with a household of stuff – you get to become very familiar with boxes and tight spaces. By the time you throw a few children into the mix, you reach a point where you own more stuff than you can possibly cope with in the dwindling time you have.
When we left Colorado in 2005, we had already held a huge garage sale and disposed of what I thought was a lot of stuff. It was a lot of stuff by the standards of any sane, normal person. The move to Amarillo, however, required multiple trips with huge rental trucks and trailers. Even so, we still left a few things behind. When we moved to Rosenberg almost three years ago, the move was made in haste and everything we brought had to fit in a rental truck and two cars. That meant leaving a lot of our belongings behind.
When you are forced to sacrifice like that, you really learn what things are important to you. I hate choosing between sentimentality and necessity. The compilation of most of my life’s work – dozens of boxes of newspaper clippings – were abandoned. Only a handful of things I’ve kept from my childhood made the trip. Most of the things that possessed me are now in a dump somewhere in the Panhandle.
We moved into Sandy’s grandfather’s house and he moved out to a retirement home. Naturally, he left us most of his stuff. Managing all of this stuff hasn’t been easy. Sandy has acquired numerous books and magazine articles on de-cluttering your life. I know she has, because I think we still have most o f them.
I no longer have the time or energy to be the anal-retentive, neat-freak perfectionist that I used to be. At home I am a husband, father and pile manager. In recent months I have been listening to a lot of self-help audio books. I’ve taken to heart Luke 12:34 and Matthew 6:21 which says “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
If there is anything I have learned it is that my stuff has taken possession of me to the point that perfectionism has been squeezed out of me and I no longer enjoy my stuff the way I used to. I have boxes that have not been emptied in four moves and nearly a dozen years. I think it’s safe to say that I don’t want or need whatever the contents are.
I have reached the point where the perfectionist side of me is ready to make the big purge. At the end of the month we are going to hold a huge yard sale. I really do not need the boxs of Star Wars cup toppers, stuffed animals, freebie items, old electronics and so on that now reside where my car should be. It’s time to kick my stuff to the curb and take my car from the curb to the garage.
When that finally happens, I will have to learn how to park the car just so in a neat, orderly way. Then I can start telling people that I’m not a perfectionist, I’m just a slob in recovery.