At the beginning of the New Year, it's not uncommon to hear friends, family, or complete strangers blurt their New Year's Resolutions with hopeful optimism and nervous anticipation. Whether or not each professed desire to eat healthier, go to the gym, or hang tried-on clothes back in your closet actually happens, it comforts us to have a plan to better ourselves in a brand new year.

Personally, I've never been one to write out my plans because I live with the precarious hope that I'll try to make each day better and not save my self-improvements for January 1st. Looking back at my past attempts to improve my life (from the journal I kept for 4 days in my sophomore year of high school to the bag of protein powder sitting in my pantry I said I'd use) my lack of resolutions hasn't really helped me either. This year I tried something entirely different from making a decision to change one or a few things about my life.

Tayler Klinkbeil

My bedroom is a neon pink and green, courtesy of my 13-year-old self, filled to the brim with clutter and clothes that haven't seen use enough to be kept. After the Christmas haul was complete and I had a pile of things on my bed with nowhere to put them away, I decided a mass cleanse was the best option. After I was done, I felt lighter and more optimistic about the coming year than I did with any vague resolution. So if you're struggling with hitting the week three wall on your New Year's Resolution, here's my suggestion: try to clean out a personal space like your room, your car, your office, or even just a desk or dresser, and I think you'll find a bit more solace than you think.

In my case, I started the process unknowingly a couple weeks before the holidays. When the drawers in my dresser wouldn't close all the way, I knew I needed to make a change. I spent a Sunday afternoon filtering each piece of clothing I owned to either Keep, Donate or For My Little Sister. By the time I was done, I had seven teeming cardboard boxes lining my hallway and dresser drawers that shut so smoothly I almost cried.

The afternoon of December 25th nearly saw the demise of all my hard work because I had piles of new things ready to replace the old ones, and I wasn't ready to say goodbye to my newfound extra space just yet. That stressor led me to complete an all-out, seven-consecutive-hour reorganization of my room (minus one extremely necessary trip to Target at Hour 4). The final product left me down one huge desk/bookshelf combo and up a sturdier bed frame found in the Guest Bedroom storage. Moving the dresser revealed a birthday card given to me in the seventh grade. I was also able to hang up several of my sister's hand-drawn Beauty and the Beast figures reminiscent of the 2017 live action release.

Tayler Klinkbeil

In all, I'm incredibly satisfied with the tidying up I've done in my bedroom, which now actually resembles a room rather than a glorified clutter arena with a bed in the middle. (Although the removal of my desk did leave me with numerous homeless books that will have to be rectified - pictured below). Not having a New Year's Resolution this year doesn't feel as daunting as it has in the past, where I've been worried that not having something written down will precede a year of doing nothing to make myself better than the last (that still wasn't enough pressure to actually make me write a resolution. Whoops).

Tayler Klinkbeil

Stepping into mid-January 2019, with the glorious birdsong and shiny sunrise of the New Year fading into a daily routine, I'm glad I have extra floor space and organized drawers to come home to. The drive home from work or school with homework or a To-Do list on my mind becomes that much easier to tackle without the impending doom not making change seems to instill in all of us. So if you take anything away from my early Spring Cleaning (besides the fact that I have too many books), I hope it's that writing something down isn't always as important as putting it into action. And that's coming from an English major, I love words, so if I'm saying it, it might possibly be true.

With that, I wish you all a productive Week 3 of 2019, and happy New Year's 5trrrr4Cleaning.