First things first: Maintaining your mental health and solving existential crises are just like getting your shit together to go on a diet or paint your apartment. You know twenty-four pounds doesn’t melt away in twenty-four hours, and that before you can paint, you have to move furniture and put down drop cloths and tape the baseboards. Well, anxiety doesn’t get cured in one wave of the magic feather duster, nor does fear of failure succumb to the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser in just five minutes!!!
Like everything else we’ve covered so far, life’s deepest shit gets tidied up and swept away one small, manageable chunk at a time.
When I talk about “getting in your own way,” I’m talking about that deep shit. Not your subpar time management and delegating skills, but your emotions and your attitude. Your mentality itself. This clutter takes the form of mental dust—it’s largely invisible but always there, and the longer you ignore it, the more invasive it becomes. It covers all the REST of your clutter with a layer of extra shit and seeps into the cracks and crevices, calling for a slightly more finessed approach to mental tidying. We’re still using the tried-and-true combo of strategy, focus, and commitment, but it’s actually happening inside you, as opposed to on the mat at the gym or high atop a ladder in your guest room.
To that end, the following pages contain advice of the kind you might also want to seek from, oh, say, a doctor or licensed counselor. Of which I am neither, so please take everything I say with a grain of salt.* Pink Himalayan sea salt if you’re feeling frisky.