It all started innocently enough. But when I paused for a second and looked at the clock, I suddenly realized that I had been sorting through my paper files for eight solid hours.
And there still is so much more to do.
I’m floored. These are files that I thought I had pretty much gone though. Twice. With assistance. And yet there are so many redundancies, and things that I will never need to look at again. And these are the files that contain my old announcements for shows, my research for pieces, copies of reviews of my work, scripts for old performances, minutes and financial statements for organizations that I was on the board of, personal correspondence and so forth, so I’m continually getting sidetracked into reading something or plunging back into abandoned projects from fifteen years ago.
And I have so many filing supplies it isn’t even funny.
What really upsets me is that in many cases not only did I file and refile this stuff, I also paid to move it twice and for much of it, I paid to store it on the west coast for three years. Yes clutter is about avoidance for me; the unwillingness to make a clear decision about something in the present that leads me to have to return to the same pieces of paper again and again, to shuffle them into new configurations and never part from them. Even though I’ve already eliminated two garbage bags of paper today, I’m watching myself set up another session two years down the road where I go through it all again. But there is a real cost attached to all that stuff; all in all I probably paid out close to eight grand to not deal with it. I have to figure out a way not to do that again
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