A Guide to Post-Exam Decluttering
A practical step-by-step guide for anxious university students
1. Separate living space and working space
Maybe over the pandemic you’ve gotten into the habit of balancing a bowl of half-boiled noodles on your lap as you wrote essays in bed, relishing the crunch as the deadline loomed, then passed, then the extension you sent 15 frantic emails to get passed as well. Perhaps the thought of enforcing rigid order, day-to-day, week-to-week, COVID wave-to-wave, began to seem absurd. But now the exams are over and the untidiness of your space has become irritating.
“Clutter” is a dispersal of stray objects, each powerless on its own but almost overwhelming in a mocking mass. “Clutter” is also a state of mind. To effectively clear your space you should first understand it as both functional and psychic space: know its history, moods, idiosyncrasies, the futile dreams it has borne over the years.
In the absence of such a comprehensive understanding of your space, a crude division into “living space” and “working space” will do.
2. Designate all of it as a “liminal space” for convenience
The phrase “liminal space” is tragically overused, but obsession with the in-between perfectly distills the zeitgeist of our times. As the tidy boundaries between aspects of your space—and life—degrade, just call all of it a “liminal space” regardless of whether this designation makes sense or not. Not only is it convenient, but naming hints at understanding, and understanding holds power.
3. Contemplate the notion of joy
After you have named your cluttered space, read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Confused about what makes an object “spark joy”, read the illustrated version as well, then binge Tidying up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, then since your laptop is already on you might as well play four or five hours of Civ5, and now you’re hungry so you can try and fail to make Peter’s sinfully delicious cabbage roll recipe.
Contemplate what it means to make a pile of objects and declare “these are containers of my joy.”
Contemplate why joy seemingly cannot exist in glorious abundance.
4. Wonder whether it was all worth it
Find your hastily scribbled notes from the first day of classes. Abandon the half-constructed piles of joy and not-joy to scroll through your school files, letting every old assignment lacerate you with its effortless coherence. Reading your essays from first year it feels like all the good ideas have been sucked out of you. What is the value of this “higher education”? Did you know when you applied to university, when you fretted about getting in, when the acceptance came and your father leaned his wrinkled forehead against yours and you realized he must be getting old even though that’s impossible, when you first worried about falling behind, when you realized many others were also behind, when you figured there was no “behind” or “ahead” that truly mattered, only getting from this moment to the next until the semester was over, then doing it all again and again and again?
The exams are brutal. The questions seem nothing like what you studied in class. Your answers are half-remembered anecdotes that could not possibly be correct, but you kitchen-sink anyway, because the exam is a test in endurance and you cannot let it defeat you. The exams are brutal because in that moment you are judged, executed, and found wanting. The exams are also almost meaningless: as you do them their value seems outsized, they tower over you; when you finish them they fade into destabilized fever-dreams, never coming into focus. Maybe you were prepared and you passed. Maybe something else happened within the multitude of possibilities. Maybe in the larger scheme of things this is a minor inconvenience.
The university’s welcome brochure (you still have it, somewhere, underneath piles of coffee-stained receipts and once-skimmed handouts about the physiology of the brain) suggested that coming to university would make you “competitive”, a kind of half-truth that disguises necessity as choice. Maybe you can’t just untangle what you love about learning (the unexpected beauty of an interaction model’s twisted plane; trite literary terms like “enjambment” and “metonymy” that pin down sensations you crave but cannot explain) from what you dislike about education—the impersonality of the Grade Point Average, which illustrates nothing and everything; the certainty worry that some of the things you are learning will have to be unlearned.
5. Go on a long walk/run/TV binge/spiritual journey
For there are only so many hours in a day, so many days in a year, so many years in a life—