When Your Thoughts Feel Too Messy, Read This

Junk drawers are a storage spot for multi-purpose random stuff—useful items, priceless items that are invaluable to anyone but you, and usually of little to no value at all. The drawer has the stuff you use or look at once in a while, the stuff you search for on that “one-time occasion” while you shove all the other stuff around creating this junk-drawer effect.

Looking into your drawer is like looking into yourself—the mirrored effect of the things you’ve used, looked at, taken for granted, and lost uncovering the truth to your personality. 

The natural state of the drawer is to be a mess, a place to find things that were meant to be or not meant to be found. Although the internet offers plenty of tips on having an organized junk drawer, without fail, every time you try to organize it, soon it’s one big mess again and there are objects and valuables flying everywhere out of their assigned spots. It’s like the drawer was just meant to be unorganized and meant to have stuff thrown in it.

The junk drawer basically describes my head, like someone took the neatly organized drawer and shook it up. My head holds all the invaluable things, memories, stuff I want to forget about, things I so badly want to remember, and stuff I don’t even know about—but it’s still all there. It’s an impossible whirlwind of thoughts: emotions and feelings, conflicting resolutions of what my head tells my heart, or what my heart tells my head, whether it’s the right thing to do or not, if I feel worthy enough, if my willpower is stronger than my fear, if I’m being humble enough, mindful enough, kind enough, strong enough. It’s an unending checklist, a survival kit of what I think I need and what I don’t, a unique drawer of the things I find useful, valuable or priceless. 

My head holds nostalgia, beautiful things. It paints pictures in sunsets and things that make me laugh so hard my ribs hurt. It also holds conflict, dark thoughts, cold feelings, things that make me different. It holds unusual talents that are only made to fit me, no one else. To anyone else, I’m incredibly unique, but still, I find myself strange and horribly awkward. 

That’s just the surface of the drawer—the first stuff you see when you open it, when you get overwhelmed by it and try to shut it out like it’s all trying to escape. The drawer gets jammed closed because it’s better to ignore it than try to organize it and throw away all the things you don’t need—maybe one day you’ll need it? But who says you can’t just leave the junk drawer alone? Because if we did, the drawer would bust open and reveal everything at once in the most destructive way. 

So we hide it away, like it’s something to be ashamed of, when really it’s a drawer of our lives; it’s messy, confusing, and out of control. A junk drawer is like everything we ever shoved inside, all forgotten, remembered, lost and found.