Unveiling Hidden Truths: Revolutionizing the Home Organizing Game
I vividly remember wanting to move out at around 7 years old. I was young but had drew a detailed map of how I was gonna leave my home when I turned 15.
I drew a line on a piece of paper with 5 or 6 dots evenly across the lines. At the top of each dot, I wrote the year and at the bottom of each dot, I wrote the age I’d be that year. I was making an escape plan via a timeline.
I figured by 15, I’d be old enough to get a job and move out on my own.
I did this at 7.
Seven.
As a new mom, I can’t even imagine my toddler feeling the way I felt. Unsafe. Uncomfortable. And not at home
Later, I’ll go more in depth of how this connects to home organizing, but first I want to introduce you to my new blog series:
Breaking the Pattern; where I share my perspective from material I read related to people of color and home, how it relates today, and how my program helps.
The topic: Overcrowded housing
The material: A report done by Shelter that surveyed 500 families based in England who are facing severe overcrowding
Click here to access the report: Full house? How overcrowded housing affects families.
The 3 major categories the report groups (based on family comments) are family relationships, child development/education, and health. And it goes on to illustrate the impacts of overcrowding within each category.
The report uses Britain’s government Bedroom Standard as a measurement for overcrowding.
The Bedroom Standard defines overcrowding in a few ways:
when there’s more people living in the home that outnumbers the amount of bedrooms.
two people that are together/married can share a space.
two people of the same age and gender 20 years old or younger
when a certain amount of floor space (or actual square footage) in a room is disproportionate to the amount of people in the space
110 sq. Ft is the appropriate amount of space for no more than two people
Family Relationships
This finding was fascinating because it clearly displayed the breakdown of the overall wellbeing of individual family members and the family as a whole. When siblings shared a space, they fought more frequently. Whether that was due to a lack of privacy, no room to play, or a large age gap.
Parents in their own words expressed what having no space meant for their kids, “The children are fighting constantly and they are always falling over things.”
What stood out to me the most is the decline in the quality of the family relationships due to the lack of space.
One parent said, “being overcrowded means no happy life for the family”.
Not even having a designated area to wind down because every inch of their home is used for survival was heartbreaking. But its the reality for so many families.
Child development and education
The second major category illustrated how a lack of space impacted children and their overall development.
For small children, one parent felt their kids were taking longer to learn how to walk. And another parent expressed that their kids are not doing well in school because they can’t concentrate at home.
A notable concern was for the education of older children who had to share a room with a younger sibling. Neither the child or parent could concentrate.
Kids didn’t have enough room to play, read, or do homework which were all made to be more difficult due to the overcrowding and no additional space.
One family said, “our eldest son is 15 and doing his GCSEs. He has no where quiet and private to study and this is causing him a lot of stress.”
Health
Another fascinating discovery was the impact overcrowding had on the physical and mental health of their children.
Almost all families with severe overcrowding reported that their physical environment caused depression, anxiety, and stress (in themselves and their children).
One parent said, “Being overcrowded has made me a very unhappy person. I no longer have friends and I am very alone.”
In two extreme cases, physical conditions manifested themselves or got worse.
One family said, “overcrowding causes damp in the house, unable to breathe properly, children suffering health problems like asthma.”
And another shares a more disheartening impact of overcrowding on their toddlers' health, “My five-year-old girl suffers a severe asthma attack due to the crowding in this house, especially in their room. In every month she misses one, two or three weeks from school.”
Why this is important
The findings confirmed what I know to be true that certain home conditions negatively impact everyone involved. I notice in my clients and audience that is even when a person no longer lives in these type of conditions, they still behave as if they do. This is where my work begins.
I’m from the school of thought that believes when a person is in survival mode long enough- it becomes their way of being. So even after their circumstances have changed, their mind, body, and spirit are still acting as if they’re in survival mode. And being in survival mode consumes one of our most precious resources; our mind. It can show up in the body via stress, anxiety, depression which we know can translate to physical ailments.
When a person is in a mental state of survival despite having everything they need, this keeps them further from being their best selves. They become someone whose contributions to the world are limited or watered down. They become less of who they truly are and made to believe the survival version of themselves is who they are.
Living in survival mode can make someone be an angrier, sadder, confused, afraid, ashamed, hostile, and more intolerable person. If you’re in the process of healing home wounds, you can start by tracing your current emotions back to a traumatic experience like overcrowding housing.
For many, being organized can feel far away because there’s these mental blocks, habits, and beliefs that serve as a barrier to letting go. To add insult to injury, these are often unspoken, unacknowledged, and invisible.
How it shows up today
My mission has always been to bring light to all the ways our past and present environments influence our sense of self and overall-well being.
I want to call out the things with no name and inspire conversation around the overlooked dysfunction at home.
When it comes to overcrowding, I see it show up today as scarcity thinking.
I’ve seen firsthand the mental conditioning of one’s previous physical circumstances carry over negatively to every space they inhabit- whether the person knows it or not.
I know from my personal experience that this is true.
I’ve seen the impacts of overcrowding on a family as a whole. Specifically how having to live with less shows up when you have more than enough. A change in your environment doesn’t automatically change your mindset, habits, and ways of being.
Very limited space requires creative thinking, temporary solutions, and sacrifices that can last for years even when its no longer necessary. The mental strain from constantly having to come up with creative solutions to basic necessities is taxing.
It could be decades before someone (re)adjust to making decisions that aren’t inconvenient or stressful because they don’t have to.
I love how movements are spreading the message that things can be easy for Black women, things don’t have to be hard. Life is hard and we can choose to make things less hard for ourselves. We have the choice to control how we experience our own lives.
Let’s flip the script and normalize easy even if it isn’t common or systemic.
How Abode help s
Abode is the only home organizing program with the container that teaches organization while addressing the mental barriers around clutter.
From the way organization is taught, to how the program is designed for Black women, Abode does this by teaching the most in-depth, culturally relevant, rich, and relatable methods to declutter your home.
For many, being organized can feel so far away because there’s these mental blocks, habits, and beliefs (both conscious and unconscious) that serve as a barrier to letting go. To add insult to injury, these are often unspoken, unacknowledged, and invisible in the first place.
The goal is to make real and lasting change in your home which won’t happen without bringing up these unspoken but felt barriers to the forefront.
For Abode members just starting the program brings things to the surface- this is before ever learning a lesson.
And mainstream home organizing doesn’t address this at all. Not even in the slightest. It’s why I created Organize For Love, to fill that gap.
What is Abode?
Abode is a membership program where Black women are given the tools and resources to declutter and organize their home so they can break away from living with excess and activate generational blessings for themselves and their family.
Whether you are ready to change or ready to get organized, the step-by-step program teaches you foundational organizing principles so you have a life skill to organize any room, no matter where you live.
The program will be opening in February for enrollment, so head to the link below to learn more Abode and get on the waitlist to be notified the exact date that its opening.
Closing
I’m hoping to shed more light and spark conversation around these topics. So please share your thoughts in the comments, send me an email, or dm about the first post in this new series.
