The Drawer Moment

I wasn’t looking for a moment of clarity. I was looking for a paperclip.

The drawer I opened was one of those you don’t really see anymore. Overstuffed. Slightly jammed. Filled with bent birthday cards, dead batteries, broken rubber bands, and pens that hadn’t worked in years. I opened it without thinking… and then I froze.

Because something in me recognized what I was staring at.

It wasn’t just a junk drawer. It was a mirror. A reflection of how I’d been living—crammed, delayed, cluttered with things I didn’t need but hadn’t questioned. The kind of mess you get used to ignoring until one day, for some reason, you don’t.

I hadn’t set out to declutter. I wasn’t chasing minimalism. I was just standing in my kitchen in socks, holding an empty paperclip box and wondering why I’d kept a key that didn’t open anything anymore.

And something about that made me stop.

There was no timer. No checklist. Just me and that drawer—and a strange sense that maybe it wasn’t just the drawer I was ready to clean out.

I started pulling things out slowly. Holding them. Questioning them. Some of it made me laugh. Some of it made me feel sad. But mostly, it made me wonder how much of my life I’d filled with the emotional equivalent of expired coupons and tangled cords—stuff I kept “just in case” or because I didn’t know what else to do with it.

That one drawer didn’t change my life. But it shifted something. It reminded me I didn’t have to tackle everything at once. That one corner of clarity is enough to begin.