Knope We Can – The Story of My Room

Today I’m going to talk about a part of my everyday life that is as real & unglamorous as it gets – my room.

But first, some Parks & Recreation talk. Have you seen it? It’s full of funny, well rounded & overall lovely characters. Though the entire cast is brilliant & I would have a hard time picking a favorite, I have a soft spot for the main character, Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler!) She’s determined, funny, hardworking & so much more; but I have never loved her more than when they gave us a glimpse into her home. Her crazy hoarder nightmare home, to be precise.

You see, I too have a crazy hoarder nightmare of a room. It’s four years & ten months since I moved into a new house (with my parents). I had just finished high school & it was a time of amazing change – I was starting college! I had a room of my own! The first few months I was deliriously happy – I chose all my own furniture (everything is crazy childish, but that’s a whole other post) & I obsessively decorated & re-decorated. But the months passed & I started to spend less & less time. My dad is away at work a lot so I shifted all my everyday essentials into the master bedroom with mom. And ever so slowly, the room I loved was used only for storing my books / clothes / jewellery & other miscellany. I went in there to dress up or drop whatever I had just bought. But that was it. In the beginning I loved it when guests came to see my room & complimented me on how cute it looked but now my pretty room stayed shut whenever we had guests, because somewhere along the line that place stopped being so pretty & became a big disorganised mess. Clothes on the chair. Books spilling out of the cabinet. Shoeboxes everywhere. Desk filled with old college books that I obviously no longer need (but failed to ever get rid of). Every time my dad came back from the ship, he tried every trick in the book to get me to clean it up. Everytime he did those things, I basically behaved like this –

Of course I knew that keeping my room clean is a good thing. But along the way I had collected so many things, the task of getting the place together was really intimidating. Besides, I told myself that I was sentimental, that I liked storing those things, that they were little bits of me. The longer I waited, the messier (& scarier) it got. I’ve broached the subject on this blog multiple times, thinking that writing about it would encourage me to actually do it. Those things help but in the end even that can’t make you do it.

You may have noticed that I’ve become an interior design / décor nut in the last few months. I actually want to blog more about those things but I felt like such a big hypocrite everytime I thought of my room. Finally a few weeks ago I was browsing some lovely homes when I just decided to shut my mac & go to my room. I sifted through the stuff there for the first times in months. Do you know what I found? That sentimental line that I kept using on myself was a bunch of bullshit. Most of the things I kept were junk. Shoeboxes are sort of useful to store things, but the rest I’m going to toss. Scraps of paper are going to get thrown out. Textbooks & clothes I’ve grown out of are going to get donated. I’m not setting any deadlines but I’m tackling a bit every day. It feels so good & more importantly doable. This is my new mantra-

The first paragraph on this post (& coralcrue’s comment) were just what I needed. If I can do it, so can you. Plans & lists are beautiful but nothing beats action. This story about my room is the perfect allegory for any kind of dream / plan / project & I’m hoping it will encourage you to do at least one thing you’ve been putting off for a while. Nike has the right idea, Just Do It!