When you go back home during Winter break, your high school self seems to haunt you. There are old environments and projects your younger self left for you to clean up. The surroundings bring you back to the habits that once inhibited you from being your best self. Let’s take a look back at the beginning.
I started out 9th-grade hating high school. I thought that the next four years of my life were going to be wasted and that I just needed to get through it no matter how much it sucked. This was an odd personality transition from middle school as I was normally an optimistic person. I ended up going into a depressive episode and stopped looking after myself. By sophomore year, I was late to school almost every day, didn’t do my homework, never cleaned or organized my room, and fell out of love with myself. After realizing that I needed to get my act and life together, I found that my first project was going to be addressing the mess I called a room. Once my room was in order starting junior year, my life started falling into place. I started participating in self-care, buying clothing I felt confident in, and studying for each class. Although my room was clean and I got my life together throughout junior and senior year, I never organized my life and stayed in my comfort zone by not getting rid of unnecessary items and habits.
I left my unorganized self back at home and gained new habits while at college for three months. Winter break came quickly, and my past self left me a large task of organizing my life back in Iowa while trying to keep my old habits from creeping up on me. After being stuck in my hometown over my first college break, here are three rules I made for myself going forward in college.
- You shouldn’t wait for a break to organize your life
I made a goal that I would start working out and taking my skincare seriously over Winter break. I realized that I would have made more progress if I had created the habits before the break. I could’ve enjoyed my break without having to stress about adding a change to my daily life. Organizing my purse, phone home screen, laptop, backpack, and deleting photos are simple tasks that don’t take a long time to do and have created less stress in my daily life. Doing simple tasks even when you feel like you are too busy, seems to be the easiest way to make your life less cluttered. Making small progress over a longer period of time will create a larger result in the end.
- Create and keep daily habits.
Aside from the beginning stress of getting into a routine, keeping daily habits in my life will reduce my stress of wondering if I will have time to work out, have a skincare routine, be with friends, and finish assignments. Scheduling out times in your calendar allows you to prioritize yourself over everything else. Time management allows you to focus on more things at once.
- Become my higher self
This rule became prevalent through the number of items in my old room that I hadn’t used for three months. If I could live without these items for that long, I thought to myself, “why am I still clinging onto them?” This led me to donate three bags and throw away two trash bags full of items that didn’t suit my life anymore. The main idea to remember when throwing away items is to not recollect more items simply because there is more space to be filled. Allow your hard work to create a change and addition in your life rather than allow you to fall back into old habits.
Knowing that I don’t have any projects to finish when I come back for spring break will allow me to grow even more while at college. With the addition of rules one and two in my life, I am forming a new lifestyle for myself that will allow me to push myself to my potential of having an organized and content life.
Decluttering your life doesn’t have to wait until you have nothing to do. Slowly working on your lifestyle as you go through each semester will give you more progress than if you kept waiting for each semester to end. There will always be tasks for you to do, it’s up to you if you want to bring old clutter into the new experiences of becoming an adult.