We all have things in our life that quietly drain us.
Lately, one of those for me has been my kitchen junk drawer. Every time I opened it to find a pen, a hair tie, chapstick or a ruler, I was pulled into a fierce game of tug of war, often losing to an errant bag of fishing bait or an orchid stake.
Last weekend I finally decided to tackle not one, but three junk drawers in our kitchen. I dreaded the whole undertaking, but somehow found myself with a rare quiet Saturday morning at home and decided to go for it. I pulled the trashcan close, opened the first drawer, and began. Trinket by trinket, I threw away 75% of the contents of chotchkie purgatory, because if I were more decisive and disciplined, that crap would have gone in the trash a long time ago.
This “trash it” method only worked because I was alone. Had Jon or the kids wandered in, they would have begged to keep a pointless this-or-that they’d otherwise forgotten about. They did not get in the way of my mission. Thank goodness!
Cleaning the junk drawer felt so good that I started eyeing the rest of the house, and have since conquered the drawers and closets of two out of five kids’ rooms. Full scale Spring Cleaning operation — officially underway. I opened and closed those newly emptied drawers a million times just to admire my masterpiece. Purging and organizing made me feel more spacious, free, and at peace.
In the middle of all of it, I found myself thinking about why junk drawers exist in the first place, and I realized the answer had nothing to do with mess or disorganization.
A junk drawer is where things land when they don’t have a home. Or more accurately, when we haven’t yet taken the time to decide where that home should be. Sometimes it’s things we might need later, sometimes things we can’t bring ourselves to throw away, and sometimes things we simply don’t want to deal with in the moment. It’s less about being disorganized and more about being undecided, and once I saw it that way, I couldn’t unsee it.
Because I do the exact same thing in my own life — just without the drawer.
A calendar filled with commitments I said yes to before I’d really checked in with myself. To-dos that follow me from week to week, not because they’re essential, but because I haven’t been willing to admit they’re not. Conversations I’ve been meaning to have, decisions I’ve been meaning to make, beliefs I’ve carried for years that don’t quite fit anymore, but that I haven’t taken the time to question.
So much of what I carry isn’t intentional. It’s just unexamined.
Every item in that drawer, at some point, required a decision: keep it, find it a home, throw it away. And instead, I chose to put it somewhere I wouldn’t have to decide. “I’ll Deal with that Later” is a pretty effective short-term strategy.
Clutter buys us time, protects us from having to make a call, from having to let something go, from potentially disappointing someone — or ourselves. In that way, it’s actually kind of brilliant.
But it’s not free.
Every time I opened that drawer, I felt it — not in a dramatic, obvious way, just a small almost imperceptible friction, a subtle irritation for something that should have been simple. And when I paid closer attention, I recognized that same feeling humming in other corners of my life too. Not overwhelming, not urgent, just a quiet, constant undercurrent of there’s a lot here.
Cleaning the drawer didn’t fix my life. But it shifted something inside me, not because everything was suddenly organized, but because for one hour I made decisions I had been avoiding for far too long. Over and over again, I chose what stayed and what went. And there was something quietly powerful about that — like a reset, not just of the drawer but of something deeper.
I don’t think the goal is to eliminate junk drawers entirely. I have five kids, and honestly that feels both unrealistic and unnecessary. Life is full, and there will always be things that haven’t found their place yet. But I’m starting to see the value in returning to the practice of clearing them out — not as a one-time event, not as some declaration that I’ve finally gotten my act together, but as a quiet reset I can come back to whenever things start to feel a little crowded.
Because it’s not just about the drawer.
It’s about the slow accumulation I don’t always notice — a commitment I said yes to without really meaning it, something I’m holding onto out of habit or guilt or the vague sense that I might need it later, a belief I haven’t questioned in years. A pen here, a calendar obligation there, an old story I keep lugging around. None of it dramatic, just a slow, steady filling-up, until one day I open the drawer — or my calendar, or my mind — and feel that familiar resistance. Not wrong, just full.
What struck me most wasn’t how good the drawer looked when I was done. It was how I felt — a little lighter, a little clearer, like I could finally see what was actually in front of me without having to dig through everything else to get there.
Maybe that’s the real point. Not to have less, not to be perfectly organized, but to create enough space to actually choose.
The drawer will fill back up — of course it will. But now I know I don’t have to keep everything that finds its way in. And maybe that’s the shift: not becoming someone who never has a junk drawer, but becoming someone who knows when it’s time to clean one out.
So here’s my invitation to you.
Find your junk drawer — the literal one, the calendar one, the mental one, whichever one has been quietly nagging at you. Pull the trashcan close. Give yourself a rare quiet hour, alone if you can manage it. And just start with one trinket at a time.
You don’t have to tackle it all at once. You don’t have to overhaul your whole life. You just have to be willing to pick something up, look at it honestly, and decide — keep it, find it a home, or let it go.
That one small act of deciding is more powerful than it sounds.
And I have a feeling you already know exactly which drawer to open first.