Mental Clutter First | My Pivot from Chaos to Clarity

My Pivot from Chaos to Clarity is my story about how I pivoted from mental clutter to clarity. The negative thoughts in my head would not turn off. I pictured a gerbil wheel in my head and the gerbil continuously rode that wheel round and round, making a lot of noise.

Growing up I felt like I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. I remember signing a greeting card to my Mom once ‘from the reject’. From a very early age, mental clutter debilitated me, though few knew it because I kept it tightly wrapped inside. The stress was real, constant, and overwhelming.

Looking back at my life’s pivots has taught me that mental decluttering must precede physical decluttering and organization—a philosophy that organically developed into what became DeclutterBuzz 2.0. My journey from mental chaos to clarity wasn’t straightforward, but each pivot taught me lessons I now share with others struggling to find peace amid their cluttered lives.

The Early Years | Seeds of Mental Clutter

At 14, I lived in a nice family home, pridefully kept up by my clean-freak mom and creative father. From the outside, everything looked perfect. But inside my head? Chaos reigned.

What I later learned through years of stream-of-consciousness writing, a 12-step recovery program, The Artist’s Way book by Julia Cameron, and a supportive community was that my parents had instilled in me a stressful concern- “What will the neighbors think?”

While my brother was studious and compliant, I was artistic and rebellious. “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” became a refrain that never landed well. My response? “Um… because he is boring.”

Check this article out if you would like to learn more about how to Stop Following Others Expectations.

I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it. So I got a job, begging my mother to sign my underage working papers despite my father’s disapproval. This early pivot taught me two crucial lessons: if I wanted something, I had to work for it, and I needed to be relentless in my pursuits.

The Escape Attempt | My Mental Clutter Has Wheels Now!

The day I reached legal age, I obtained a driver’s license and, somehow, my father convinced my mother to get me a car. Let the party begin! I pivoted to become the repressed party person I’d always strived to be—while maintaining a good employee record and making art in my spare time.

This lifestyle continued until my early thirties when I chose to change but couldn’t. I didn’t know how. My addictions held me hostage, and though I kept trying, I couldn’t break free.

My first major pivot came when I joined a 12-step program—a relationship that was love/hate for many years. The stress of living substance-free felt insurmountable. I once heard at an AA meeting: “I drank from a very young age, not in the first grade—but I sure coulda used a stiff one!”

I was faced with having to change my habits and clueless where to start. Change Your Habits | Change Your Life is an article I wrote if you would like to read more about this.

I wore a neck brace for eleven years due to migraine-like headaches—stress manifestations I didn’t recognize at the time, which only created additional stress.

What became crystal clear was how hard it is to learn to live among “normal” people while completely sober. My addictions had masked all my fears. So not only did I have to maintain total abstinence, but I also had to face all my fears constantly, day and night.

It was hell. But I managed to keep pivoting through the ways of life that weren’t working for me.

The Trucker Pivot | Running Even Further

My scariest pivot came when I finally pried myself loose from my addictions and decided to become a long-haul trucker—much to my Jewish mom’s dismay. My poor family had to live with me as a rebellious teenager.

After high school, when I wasn’t allowed to attend the Bob Bondurant school of race car driving in California, I promised myself I’d find another way to satisfy my love of sports cars driving.

After beating myself up on the road for a few years, I learned driving big rigs didn’t pay the big bucks it promised. It was a difficult job for a woman and lonesome as heck. Time to pivot again!

The Mental Decluttering Journey | My Most Critical Pivots

Looking back, I can identify the pivots that truly transformed my cluttered mind. These pivots began only after I learned to accept the people, places and things in my life. I came to find once I accepted life on life’s terms I began to have an easier time of things.

Today I know for sure all the answers to all my obstacles are in accepting what I can and cannot change. I wrote about this in an article called Acceptance Is The First Step to Clearing Mental Clutter.

• From being afraid of people to learning about relationships and how they start with me. Being the person I wanted to attract.
• From having no confidence to developing confidence in some things, then many things.
• From wanting to be invisible to standing on stage teaching others.
• From whining to taking responsibility for my actions, words, and deeds. Accepting that I alone am responsible, no one else.
• From fearing the awesome responsibility of caring for another life to making my puppies a central part of my life.
• From being too afraid to try new things to exploring art education, then teaching art to others.
• From fearing social situations to an invited artist to my first “One Woman Art Show”—a huge pivotal moment that started me on a serious healing path ten years into sobriety.

I was learning that “everybody hates me and I’m going to eat worms” wasn’t the least bit true. This stunned me. I’d been so sure of this my whole life. Everyone was telling me the opposite and buying my artwork so this put a crack in that theory. Everyone couldn’t be lying!

It took practice, lots of practice, but today I know I have plenty to offer others, and nothing brings greater joy than being of service to others.

The Writing Practice | Where Real Change

When someone asked if I wanted to read “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron with them, I said yes despite my terror of the unknown. This is when real changes started happening—because this is when I learned stream of consciousness writing held the answers I was looking for. Some call this journaling.

I was doing Stream of Consciousness writing daily by hand, three pages in a spiral-bound notebook and this simply means jotting my thoughts on 3 pages of paper in a journal or cheap spiral notebook as they enter my head- without regard to punctuation, grammar and neatness. Year after year I practiced this exercise while working 2 and 3 jobs and I have cartons of filled notebooks to prove it! I still write today.

Because many friends in recovery were doing The Artist’s Way together, we recognized the difference between it and recovery programs and how together they work magically.

The Artist’s Way has a positive spin on learning everything we should all know, as opposed to the 12-step program’s focus on learning through examining wrongdoings.

Practicing both programs simultaneously gave us all a great foundation for living healthy, balanced lives and stopping the waste of time and being stuck in bad places. How we started to soar!
We became artists, writers, pharmacists, and someone who learned how to heal using acupuncture and she is still providing her valuable service.

It is interesting to think we all throughout the years have been the first to quietly give back to our communities with pro-bono work.

There are so many awesome stories from incredibly strong ladies healing including women being so grateful to be in this new life we want to give back to others.

Life is not always kind and to be able to pass on what was so freely given to us to help others live easier days is so cool for all.

I was told early on to find someone who had what I wanted, jump in their back pocket and emulate them. I did this and it worked!

Here is a short video where I talk about looking back at where I was and where I am today. I made this video while enjoying a puppy walk today.

My Vision Board Helped Tame the Gerbils In My Head

I discovered something transformative when I focused on my dreams, the negative thought loops quieted. Instead of ruminating on problems, my mind explored possibilities. This simple shift taught me the profound value of dreaming and setting goals.

By the time I finished my first journey through The Artist’s Way with my circle of treasured friends, I had gained the courage to quit what I call my “last real paying job” – easily the worst position I’d ever held. This pivotal chapter happened because I dared to dream and take a significant risk.

One of the most impactful exercises with my group was creating a vision board. While others spent days meticulously cutting and pasting dreams onto poster boards, my approach was simpler: just a single picture of the ocean, representing my dream to own a home with a water view. Here’s that vision board…

I displayed this vision board where I’d see it daily. Despite naysayers who thought I was unrealistic seeking an oceanfront home, I held firmly to my dream. When the realtor eventually called with a potential property, I knew it was mine before even stepping inside – declaring “I’ll buy it” from the front door. That was 30 years ago.

Freedom and Making Art For a Living

During my truck driving days, I filled downtime by stringing beads and making jewelry. I’d stock up at Beadworks on Newbury Street in Boston before hitting the road again.

One pivotal day, I noticed an invitation to an open studio in an unfamiliar town. I told my dispatcher I needed to be home for “an important thing” on that date. Walking into that studio changed everything—suddenly I was learning to melt glass.

I soon traded my tractor-trailer for a school bus driving job, bought a torch and some Venetian glass, and launched my creative career. Those early years were challenging—juggling bus driving and glass work led to severe health issues resulting in the removal of my thyroid function.

Recovery was brutal. At one point, I was napping nine times daily, yet I refused to quit. Through this rough patch, my community of friends saw something I couldn’t yet see: my potential to make a living solely through my art.

The Jumping Off Part of My Pivot

With their encouragement, I first secured a mortgage and bought my home. The very next day, I quit bus driving to focus entirely on glass art. For the next 20 years, I supported myself through 12-15 art shows annually—a grueling but fulfilling schedule.

Thankfully online stores became easy platforms to sell art so this removed the stress of always preparing for shows.

I didn’t realize then how rare it is for an artist—especially a woman—to be entirely self-supporting through art. Despite financially frightening periods, I always found ways to pay my bills.

My husband died when I was only two years into recovery and in my thirties. After trying dating just twice, I decided it was a poor investment of my precious time. Being my sole support became both necessity and strength.

Now I’m winding down this business due to health concerns and because I’m called to devote more energy to DeclutterBuzz 2.0. There’s simply more joy in helping people experience their “AHA!” moments than in selling art to those privileged enough to afford it.

The Birth of DeclutterBuzz | My Purpose Found

When I started DeclutterBuzz one of the first things I learned was how very encompassing decluttering truly is.

I never understood that when helping people declutter their homes of physical stuff, I was actually teaching them everything I had learned from my recovery and Artist’s Way journey. Every single obstacle people encounter when letting go of physical clutter mirrors the mental and emotional challenges I worked through over decades.

The Hardest Pivot | Grief and New Beginnings

The hardest pivot by far was the most recent. Last summer, my soulmate puppy was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died five months later. The pivot of Simon and I being attached to the hip for 12 years and the loudest silence the day he died all but killed me.

Dog lovers understand this pain. When I said I was getting a puppy my friends thought I was insane. I stopped listening to all the “but what if this or that happens?” people were telling me and brought a new pup home a couple of weeks ago. I have learned that the odds are 50/50 the ‘what ifs’ won’t happen. So I took the risk.

Because I dared to pivot, my home is once again filled with puppy laughter as Simon looks after us all from wherever the little bugger landed.

My Current Pivot | Letting Go of a 30-Year Identity

I need that puppy laughter while breaking down my 30-year-old glass art business—a process I’ve been working through for several years. This is one of the most challenging transitions I’ve faced recently because it contains all the decluttering obstacles in one goal.

Self identity is an obstacle to decluttering and this was the toughest obstacle I faced. I fretted about not being an artist anymore if I stopped melting glass, which is silly because I’m an artist to my core. I worried, “What if others think I’m a failure?”

BUZZ… who cares what others think? I’ve been a self-supporting artist for 30 years! I’m successful by all accounts.

I’m now selling pieces of art I’ve made and still generating the revenue glass-melting brings. But I can’t ignore the message from medical professionals who diagnosed a rare fungal infection in my respiratory system years ago and advised me to change careers. Another respiratory issue for almost a year now is making me hear that message louder. So time to continue pivoting!

I’ve learned through experience that when one door closes, others open. Taking the final leap is the step I need to bust my new business wide open!

Latest Pivot | Why I Created DeclutterBuzz 2.0

I pivoted from writing articles like “101 items to declutter today” and “What room to start decluttering” to focusing on “Decluttering is an inside job” because I know few people will sustain even the best decluttering effort unless they change the habits and behaviors that created the clutter.

Watching many people who did not choose to do the work or follow the guidance, end up in their old lives only to experience worse conditions than had disabled them was a lesson to me. It is heartbreaking and avoidable.

I became incensed listening to “decluttering gurus” pitch ridiculous, overpriced “organizational systems” and high-priced classes to stressed-out, cluttered people while I’ve been helping people declutter their lives by eliminating possessions, not organizing them, and showing them that real change comes from changing the habits that got them where they are.’

Proper decluttering requires a strong sense of self, and confidence because often our identity is involved when decluttering. Decision making is involved and poor decision makers have an extra challenge. Other challenges decluttering represents are not being fully present with one foot in the past and the other in the future.

Learning what habits need to be replaced and what habits to commit to consistently practice is necessary. Some of us are procrastinators, and some people quite openly admit to being lazy. Some of us are overstretched and blame time restraints to be our obstacles.

The truth is there are work arounds for all the things you encounter while trying to declutter. We cover all these things when we start by decluttering our minds. The perk is you will notice these neat changes spill into your life overall by practicing these new habits.

I price my monthly membership at only $9 a month —because I want everyone who wants and needs access to have it, and I suspect people can afford what they typically spend on a fancy coffee to learn the real secrets of living a decluttered life.

And one more thing… because I have a pet peeve about having to just about hire a private investigator to find the unsubscribe buttons to some of my own subscriptions I make it wicked easy for people to cancel their membership anytime they want.

The Full Circle Moment

I remember 38 years ago when I entered recovery being told that in time I would come to find the abstinence piece the easiest part; the hard part would be changing everything about myself. I laughed because I thought this was a joke.

Did I change every part of me? Not exactly. There were parts of me I liked, so I kept the fact that I am sensitive, for example, and as I used to remind my mom, ‘My sensitivities are what makes a compassionate person and why I always find time to help you’. ; ()

What a mind-blowing transformation! From mental clutter that left me feeling like a misfit to helping others clear their minds first so they can truly transform their spaces—and their lives.

Your decluttering journey doesn’t have to take decades like mine did. The path I’ve forged can help you clear your mental clutter first, making physical decluttering not just possible but sustainable.