Tidying the Abyss: A Practical Guide to Cleaning and Organizing While Exhausted and Overwhelmed

A gentle, hands-on resource offering mental health-sensitive, disability-informed advice for those who do not have the privilege, bandwidth, or access to keep their home—and life—in a perfectly-ordered state.

When we see people in desperate situations, we are quick to sympathize but also quick to explain to ourselves why that couldn’t be us. We could never live in squalor—we’re just too responsible! We could never get a disabling illness that prevents us from easily enacting life skills—we’re always so good about exercising and taking our supplements! And we certainly couldn’t spend our lives in endless, menial suffering—we plan to be blessed!
     But the truth is, desperation and chaos are just a few unfortunate events away for any of us. Keeping your life clean, orderly, and peaceful involves skill, but it also involves privilege, luck, and having access to a responsible adult with the bandwidth to teach you. Even then, responsibility does not save us from chaos. And when our lives are upended, our dishes, our laundry, and our bills mercilessly persist, piling around us, an oppressive burden.
     In Tidying the Abyss one-time clinical social worker and current professional organizer Amanda Dodson provides a gentle, step-by-step guide to keeping house even when one's life is turned upside-down by an unexpected and permanent change to their, or a loved-one's, ability. Dodson advocates for the abandoning of perfection to make room for creative, livable solutions, no matter where one falls on the spectrum of being chronically ill, neurodivergent, or hopeless at home maintenance.