How to come back from chaos
How much is too much? (Image by Eveline de Bruin)
“They want me to write what?”
Just kidding. I choose my own topics. And today I’m choosing a topic that I’m an expert on: how to come back from chaos.
In some ways I’m the worst person to talk about this. Maybe you’d rather hear from someone who is an expert at preventing chaos.
Sorry — you’re stuck with me, a chaos generator. But here’s my advantage: I find myself in chaos so often that I have a lot of practice getting out of it, like a magician who repeatedly puts himself in a straitjacket in a water tank on purpose. Except I’m not doing it on purpose.
Anyway, whether it is illness, a move, travel, birth, death, or a wedding that causes upheaval in your life, it is not a hopeless situation.
And that is actually the first step of coming back from chaos: Recognizing that it isn’t permanent or hopeless. That attitude makes all the difference.
It may seem pointless to put your dirty clothes in the hamper when the room is otherwise strewn with a laundry load’s worth of dirty clothes, but it is not. You don’t have to make every choice in the direction of order and tidiness, but every choice you do make in that direction will help you. All is not lost.
As we are shifting our attitudes, it will also help to have some compassion for yourself and how you got here. When you come back from a trip late Sunday night and have to work first thing Monday, things will be a little messy. This problem can easily compound over the next few days with a missed trip to the grocery store, a missed load of laundry, a missed dump run, and so on. The squalor that you find yourself in a few days later doesn’t mean that you’re a bad or lazy person. You’ve just got some catching up to do.
If we’re not beating ourselves up, it is easier to summon the energy to do what we can. That said, the work ahead may feel overwhelming. To deal with this, start small. Take one dish to the kitchen. Pick up one piece of trash off of a surface and throw it away. Straighten one pillow on the sofa. Each thing you do gives you a little momentum for the next one, and the next.
It may be necessary to let go of some of the other things you were going to do in order to accommodate the backlog of things you feel you should have already done. Recently, I took a break from posting videos on TikTok in order to get caught up on a few administrative tasks that had stacked up. It was kind of a weird tradeoff, but it added a sense of ease to my life when I really needed it.
Receiving outside help can be a game-changer when it comes to taming chaos. You can get someone to clean our house or get your groceries for you, or you can ask a friend or family member to be a “body double” for you when you’re trying to stay accountable and follow through on the scary tasks you have to do. There is no shame in needing support, and you are not a burden. You’re giving other people a chance to be useful, and most of us really enjoy that.
Little by little, boringly and unglamorously, you will see signs of visible progress as you continue to put in effort. This may motivate you to pick up the pace, but it’s okay if you can’t. As long as you keep going, you will continue to see improvements.
Of course, life may heap another helping of chaos upon you in the meantime, as life does. But when your choice is to give up or stay with it, I hope you stay with it. Though it’s true that chaos compounds over time, so does the progress you make from persistent effort.
Hang in there.
