Why my life is like a cupboard

Whenever I look at my lists of New Year's Resolutions (and just plain resolutions) from the past several years, there is a common theme. Be More Organised And Disciplined. And Relax More. The two are a bit contradictory.

I know from what friends have said that I come across as an organised and disciplined person. But inside I don't feel organised and disciplined. I feel like I never really have a handle on life, and my organisation is a way of keeping the inevitable chaos at bay. It's as if my life is a crowded cupboard where the contents are straining against the door, and the slightest touch of the handle will cause them to spring out. I feel like I have to struggle to stay in control of everything, all the time (which is possibly one reason why I have my door-and-appliance-checking compulsions).

I think this need I have for everything to be organised and under control stems in part from growing up in Zimbabwe. My mum has this too. We lived in such chaos there, and everything seemed to impermanent - I was aware that our 'normal' lives could crumble at any moment. There was craziness happening all around us. Everything was so unpredictable. I almost used to crave boredom. I envied people the luxury of being bored. I couldn't be bored, because I didn't feel safe enough to (if that makes sense). When you are painfully aware that 'anything can happen to anyone, at any time' (to quote Arundhati Roy), you can't be complacent.

We tried to combat this feeling by taking charge of the things we had some power over. Like cleaning the house. Performing our little rituals for safety at night (locking the doors and windows, bolting the doors and windows, locking the rape gate, setting the burglar alarm). Hoarding groceries that we might not have been able to get the following week, like sugar and bread. Hoarding petrol. It was an endless battle to keep on top of it all, as much as we could. We were piling up little sandbags of organisation and security against the flood that we knew was coming, sooner or later.

This has carried over into our lives in New Zealand. For a while, when we first arrived here, I felt nervous and jumpy all the time. It was leftover adrenaline from Zimbabwe, which had no concrete thing to focus on. Over time, this faded. But I still have a need to organise, file, hoard, obsessively prepare. I don't ever feel like I'm doing enough.

I don't think I'll ever shake some of my old habits, like: clutching my handbag tightly when I walk in public; locking the car doors while I'm driving; getting jumpy and nervous when my petrol tank is less than half-full; obsessively checking the house doors are locked; feeling nervous going out at night, even when it's to a friend's house in a safe neighbourhood.

I still want to be as organised and disciplined as I possibly can, but I don't want to feel guilty about it when I let things slide a little. I want to be content with some chaos in my life, because it's not possible to be completely in control of everything all the time, and trying to achieve the impossible is only going to make me feel discouraged.

And I still want to learn to relax.

Working on it.