How do you start decluttering when you are overwhelmed?
I asked myself that question for years. And for years, the answer was always the same. Later. Next month. When I have more energy. When the weather cools down. When the kids visit and can help.
Then a fall took the choice out of my hands.
A few years ago, I was carrying a basket of laundry down the stairs and missed the bottom step. I went down hard on my left side.
Nothing was broken (thank God), but I tore something in my knee and bruised my hip badly enough that I spent the next several weeks on a walker and then a cane.
I was sixty-one at the time. Healthy. Active. The kind of person who still carried groceries in one trip and refused to ask for help reaching the top shelf.
That fall humbled me fast.
My daughter drove in to stay with me for the first week. She handled the laundry, made meals, helped me get around, and did all the things I normally do without thinking twice.
And that’s when I started seeing my house the way she was seeing it.
The boxes stacked on the landing that she had to step around every trip downstairs. The garage so full she could barely reach the washing machine. The narrow path between furniture in the living room that a walker barely fit through.
None of this had ever been a problem before. I knew where everything was. I could get to it all just fine.
Until I couldn’t.
That fall didn’t just change how I moved through my home for six weeks. It changed how I see every room in this house permanently.
And it made me wish, more than almost anything, that I had started decluttering when it would have been easy instead of waiting until it became an emergency.