It would be very easy to walk into my house, you know, if you were invited, and think, jees, you have no organisational structure to your life at all, and honestly, you would be forgiven, at least to some degree, for thinking that. I am a bit scatterbrained. I forget things a lot, I get confused a lot and inevitably I walk out of the house with the feeling that I'm going without something literally every time I go anywhere, and sometimes, it's a whole list. Most of the time, that is okay, because for most things you can replace them pretty easily where you're going. I regularly get to camps early because I know I will need to drive off and find something that I have realised I have forgotten. I'm also good at remembering things other people will have forgotten and other people do that for me and generally, we all muddle along pretty well. There will always be a time when you forget mugs, well, there was that time I forgot mugs anyway, there will always be someone who forgets a chair. There will always be multiple people who forget chairs.
Organisation is something I try to achieve but unfortunately there is no one linear way to do things, so inevitably things go missing not because they're stored illogically or in the 'wrong place' but because I can't remember what I thought the right place was when I actually stored it. You know the old joke of keeping something so safe even I don't know where it is, that's me, a hundred percent. I was recently looking for the other book by Dr Richard Shepherd 'Unnatural Causes' whilst reading 'The Seven Ages of Death' - ridiculously I started reading this because I had to wait for Christmas to get the next Bridgerton book, and this was the next "logical" choice - and I was somewhat obsessed with the idea that it was on one of the bookshelves, effectively filed with other books which were the sort that aren't best sellers, but almost like current W H Smith most recommended or something, which would have put it in the same place as 'The Hate You Give' and Hibo Wardere's 'Cut'. I kept looking in the same place, partly because when I last thought I had lost a book, that was where it turned up. Annoyingly, I could see the previous missing title - my beloved 'Before I Go To Sleep' by S J Watson, but I could not find 'Unnatural Causes'. I'm pretty impressed though because I knew I had it. Like, I KNEW. There have been multiple occasions over my life where I have ended up with two copies of the same book because I forgot I had it already, so I impressed myself knowing I had it, even though I was irritated as fluff that I didn't know where it was.
This isn't just some lengthy thing so I can go on about all of the wonderful books that are taking up the shelves of my library guest room merge storage area, but just simply trying to explain that I was looking in a very logical place for it, not just for one reason - it was one of those books that was highly recommended at the time - but also because it was a place I had previously located something which had been missing. It turned out that the damn thing was in the equally logical position of being the opposite side of the room in a stack which sits atop the books which are properly shelved - I refuse to believe I have too many books, I just don't have a proper way to store them - with the likes of Adam Kay's 'This Is Going to Hurt'. Why? Because I sorted the books on that side of the room by genre, or at least started to, and so there is a whole section on crime fiction, there is a whole bit on serial killers, there's all the war time stories like 'Bread, Jam and a Borrowed Pram', everything animal related, Jojo Moyes has her own section, there's the LGBTQIA+ fiction stack and there is the pile of medical books. There's a few different nurses' stories, there's a prison doctor's story, and there is one of the most recent books that ripped my heart out, 'When Breath Becomes Air'.
Somehow, despite the fact that there was some emotional turmoil deciding where 'When Breath Becomes Air' should live because I was torn between putting it with 'The Fault In Our Stars' to have a little epic books that made me cry hysterically section, having it with the other medical books where it ended or putting it on one of these gorgeous house shaped shelves that are above the guest bed, because that's where some of my very favourite books are. A few NaNo novels live up there - yes, including the proof copy of mine - 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' is up there, there's a few Jodi Picoult's and the only reason Jojo Moyes didn't end up there is because she's written too many books for me to put them all up there and I can't bare to separate them.
Okay, that did turn into a bit of a tangent.
The point is, even when I am very deliberate and very specific with trying to be organised, it doesn't always work, particularly when it comes to issues with object permanence; if I can't see it, it doesn't exist, but it becomes an, if I can't see it, I can't find it, because who knows what system I filed it by. So many things come into this and it's also one of those 'if I put it down it is lost' situations which is why I need to figure out what I'm doing with something when I'm looking at it, or I need to do a task when I pick it up, because if I put it down, God only knows when I will find it again to sort it, and some things just don't work like that, do they?
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