“I thought, ‘I don’t have one of those — I need one.’”
With time, Schaub accumulated several, along with a husband, two daughters and a Pawlet home with a room for everyone and another to spare.
“It’s 567 square feet,” she specifies of the latter space. “That’s a lot.”
Or was. Soon it was replaced by an accumulation of the likes of a red plastic barrette she wore in elementary school, a Playbill signed by Donny Osmond, a poster from a talk the photographer Lee Friedlander gave at Cornell University in 1991.
“Over time it has gone from being the Very Messy Room to the Storage Room to the Throw-In-Whatever-We-Can’t-Decide-What-to-Do-With Room to the For-Pete’s-Sake-Don’t-Open-That-Door! Room,” Schaub writes. “Every year, I make a New Year’s resolution to fix it, clean it up, turn it back into a room that our family can actually use.”
Then Schaub discovered a YouTube video titled “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” by Dr. Robert Lustig and instead spent the next 12 months dropping the sweetener from her family’s diet. Blogging about the experience, she went on to write a book, “Year of No Sugar.” That, in turn, landed her on the Dr. Oz television show.
“Everywhere I went,” she recalls, “people asked, ‘What are you doing next?’”
That’s when Schaub returned to her resolution to tackle a “Year of No Clutter.”
“I’ve been a collector my entire life, but it had gone beyond organized chaos to just chaos,” she says in an interview. “At what point does it cross a line and turn into a problem?”
“One of the first things I got rid of,” she says, “was my stack of how-to-declutter books.”
The author then dove physically and psychologically beneath the surface of all her stuff.
“I had a light bulb moment when a friend asked, ‘What’s the difference between clutter and a mess?’” she recalls. “If your kitchen’s a mess, you clean it up. Clutter is about deferred decisions. I discovered I had a fear of making decisions because I had a fear of making the wrong decisions.”
And so chapters titled “We Begin” and “We Continue to Begin” eventually lead to “What We Talk About When We Talk About Clutter.”
“How many dead and dying things have made their way to that upstairs sanctuary,” she writes, “simply because I was somewhere between bargaining and denial in the stages of grief?”
Schaub, whose promotional efforts have included a recent online live chat with readers of The Washington Post, is set to speak Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at Burlington’s Phoenix Books.
Then she’ll return home, hopefully without a souvenir program. She likens avoiding clutter to abstaining from sugar.
“It’s not something you do and you’re done,” she says. “I’ve learned it’s a way of life.”
