dolorosa_12 | Thoughts like wild geese

I'm still not feeling great, but I think I'm just going to have to accept that this week is a write-off in terms of mental health. It's been bucketing down with rain here for pretty much all of October (although weirdly this week the only time it hasn't been raining has been the early hours of the morning when Matthias and I go out running), and I think the lack of access to green space (beyond ... running through it briefly) is starting to get to me. It makes me feel tense and on edge.

In better news, however, our decluttering has been a roaring success. We have now got rid of every single item that we wanted to give away:

An electronics recycling company came and collected all our old laptops/routers/cables/chargers on Friday. Best of all, they did this for free.

One of my work colleagues took an old CD player that we weren't using.

A PhD student in my former department took my Modern Irish textbooks/grammar books.

Another PhD student took some of Matthias's old linguistics books (although not the whole lot).

A charity took a huge bagful of old winter coats and lighter jackets (these are still fine, we've just replaced most of them).

People on Freecycle took our old outdoor table, a spare mortar and pestle (for some reason we had two), some bags of potting mix, and an old vacuum cleaner.

It feels as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

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corvidology

Sorry you're still down. ♥

It's truly amazing how much lighter you can make yourself feel by decluttering your home.

It's amazing to be able to lay hands on things without having to dig through a pile.

dolorosa_12

In terms of the decluttering, I'm just infuriated with myself that I didn't do this years ago. We've been living in this house for eight years (the longest I have ever lived in a single place), and I think we just assumed getting rid of this stuff would be a lot harder than it was. We don't have a car (I don't know how to drive, and my husband learnt to drive in Germany and has never driven on the left-hand side of the rode) and my assumption always was that it's hard to get rid of bulky items if you can't drive them — but it hasn't been necessary.

Thanks for the well wishes.