getting organized & the muse

'I NEED TO GET ORGANIZED' has been the constant refrain of my inner articulations for most of my conscious life.

Having grown up in a chaotic household, where any hope of wholesome structure was dim and distant, I have to wonder if my own proclivity for free form lifestyle is BOTH nature and nurture.

From my own experience, I'd say that bringing up children in disorder is inadvisable.  Even though as a child, I had horrible nightmares of suddenly being thrust into a regulated environment--a Victorian orphanage, for example. I was fearful of peers' parents who had a reputation for being 'strict'. I understood it as a synonym for cruelty. I was afraid of the neighbor girl's mother who despotically enforced afternoon naps.

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This wasn't to say that growing up disorderly was paradise. Far from it. My room was a junk pile of old toys and books, but it rarely dawned on me that there was an alternative. Sometimes my father would venture in to chastise me for my slovenliness. But I was an untutored little girl. I was mystified by his critique. Did other modalities exist? These were only distantly surmised, perhaps in foreign lands or other planets. Closer to home, actually within the home, the parental master bedroom resided in majestic ruin, full of Collieresque stacks and piles of papers and miscellaneous items--and actually included little paths from door, to bed, to closet, to bathroom.

I'll say this for the disorderly childhood. You learn not to exist in your environment. Physical reality becomes something you tolerate. Hold at arm's length. Learn to ignore. It enforces external passivity.

Such formative experience forces you inward. In my case, it was into storybooks. The library. My artwork. My own precocious scribblings, the 'novels' composed at age nine. These became far more important and far more real.  The worlds of my own making.