I Painted Over the Gray and Found Myself Again

There is a very particular kind of chaos that happens when you decide you are going to declutter your house.

It begins innocently enough.

You open one closet.

Perhaps you are feeling ambitious. Responsible. Maybe you have coffee. You tell yourself you are simply going to clean out this one little space, and thirty-seven minutes later you are sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by old charging cords, three tote bags, a candle you apparently purchased during a completely different personality era, and an object you have absolutely no memory of acquiring.

At some point you hold something up and yell across the house:

“WHY DO WE EVEN OWN THIS?”

Nobody knows.

This has basically been my life lately.

I have been clearing closets, donating things, throwing things away, rearranging furniture, decorating rooms and systematically wandering through our house asking whether the things taking up space here actually belong in the life we are living now.

And somewhere in the middle of all that hauling and sorting and painting, something unexpected happened.

I started feeling lighter.

Even more surprising?

For the first time in a very long time, I feel completely at home in my own home.

Apparently, I Was Living Inside a Gray Box

For years, much of our house was perfectly fine.

Fine.

What a bleak little word.

The walls were gray. The rooms were functional. The furniture worked. Everything was reasonably pleasant and completely inoffensive.

It just wasn’t me.

Which is frankly hilarious when you think about it.

I am a woman who grows dahlias, makes stained glass, owns an unreasonable number of books, talks to plants, teaches yoga, lives on a farm filled with animals, gets entirely too excited about seed catalogs and believes a steaming cup of coffee qualifies as emotional support.

And somehow I was living among plain gray walls.

Who authorized this?

Because beige-and-gray tranquility may be beautiful for someone else, but apparently my nervous system has been waiting patiently for me to remember that I like color.

I like texture.

I like art.

I like plants cascading from things.

I like warm light and strange treasures and books stacked on tables. I like rooms that feel collected rather than purchased as a complete personality package from aisle seven.

I want my home to contain evidence that actual humans live here.

Humans with hobbies.

Humans with stories.

Humans who occasionally leave a book on the coffee table and a dog toy in the walkway and dirt by the back door because somebody has been outside growing something.

The more I have changed our spaces, the more I have realized I wasn’t really trying to decorate a house.

I was trying to make our home tell the truth about who lives inside it.

And that feels completely different.

Decluttering Isn’t Really About Owning Less

I am not suddenly becoming a minimalist.

Let’s not get carried away.

I make stained glass and garden. Minimalism was never realistically on the table.

I have supplies.

There are books.

There are seed packets.

There are probably flowerpots hiding in places even I don’t know about yet.

What I am becoming much more interested in is intentional ownership.

There is a difference between being surrounded by things you love and being surrounded by things you have simply failed to deal with.

That distinction has become enormously clear during this reset.

Every unfinished pile quietly asks something of you.

Put me away.

Fix me.

Decide about me.

Find a place for me.

Donate me.

Finish me.

Remember why you bought me.

A house can become filled with hundreds of tiny unanswered questions.

And even when we aren’t consciously thinking about them, our brains are still taking in the environment around us.

Research backs up at least part of that feeling. Scientists at Princeton studying visual attention have found that multiple things within our visual field compete for neural representation. In very plain English: our brains have limited processing capacity, and visual information is constantly competing for some of it.

That does not mean one laundry basket on the chair is murdering your creativity.

Thank goodness, because we would all be doomed.

But it does help explain why a visually overwhelming environment can sometimes make it harder to settle into focused work.

For me, creativity requires a little breathing room.

Not sterility.

Not white walls and one elegantly placed twig in a ceramic vase.

Room.

Room for my thoughts to wander without tripping over seventeen unfinished decisions.

That has been one of the greatest gifts of this whole-house reset.

Maybe Our Homes Affect Us More Than We Realize

One of the most interesting studies I found while thinking about all of this was published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 2025.

Researchers surveyed 501 adults and found that greater home clutter was associated with more negative affect, lower mental well-being and lower life satisfaction. Even more interesting to me, part of the relationship appeared to be mediated by something surprisingly simple:

How beautiful people perceived their homes to be.

The researchers are careful to point out that the study was correlational, so we cannot say clutter directly causes poor well-being. But they found that perceived home beauty itself was associated with better well-being.

That stopped me for a minute.

Because beauty can sound frivolous.

Especially for women.

There is always something more productive we could supposedly be doing.

Why paint the room?

Why hang the art?

Why spend an afternoon moving furniture around?

Why plant flowers when vegetables are more useful?

Why make stained glass when you could buy something perfectly adequate at a store?

Because beauty isn’t always about impressing somebody else.

Sometimes beauty is how we recognize ourselves.

And lately, I keep walking through our house and smiling.

Not because it belongs in a magazine.

It doesn’t.

There are dogs here.

Let’s remain reasonable.

I smile because I recognize the person who lives here now.

And Yes, We Need to Talk About Cortisol

Longtime readers know I am deeply interested in stress, nervous-system health and the ways our everyday choices affect how we feel.

So naturally, I went poking around the research to see whether there was any actual science behind the whole “my house feels calmer now” phenomenon.

There is.

A UCLA study published in 2010 looked at how couples described their homes and then tracked cortisol patterns over several days. Women who described their homes using more language related to clutter and unfinished projects had flatter daily cortisol slopes and worsening mood through the day, while those whose descriptions reflected more restorative environments showed healthier patterns.

Again, this doesn’t mean a messy countertop causes a cortisol disorder.

Bodies are infinitely more complicated than Instagram wellness graphics would have us believe.

But it does reinforce something I have been learning in a dozen different areas of my life:

Our environments matter.

The people we surround ourselves with matter.

The noise we consume matters.

The commitments we make matter.

And apparently, the spaces we come home to matter too.

It feels remarkably connected to what I wrote about in Not Making Someone Else’s Urgency Your Priority. Protecting our peace isn’t always some dramatic act of boundary setting.

Sometimes it looks like getting rid of six bags of crap you haven’t used since 2014.

Wellness is surprisingly glamorous around here.

Then I Found the Color Study

Now we arrive at my favorite bit.

Because somewhere along this decorating adventure I began wondering whether my sudden desire to banish all those gray walls was simply aesthetic rebellion or whether color itself might affect stress.

A randomized controlled trial published in Schizophrenia Bulletin in February 2026 followed 120 employees identified as experiencing high stress.

Researchers redesigned the intervention group’s offices using low-saturation blue-green walls, warm yellow accent areas and standardized lighting. The control group remained in conventional gray-white offices.

After four weeks, the redesigned group reported significantly lower perceived stress, and researchers measured an 18.7 percent reduction in salivary cortisol, while the control group showed little change.

Now.

Before we all sprint to the paint store screaming, “SCIENCE SAYS I NEED A PEACOCK-TEAL LIVING ROOM,” there are important limitations. (Although I AM a bit partial to Teal walls right now.)

This was an office study, not a home study. It involved specific color combinations, not “more color” in general. And color psychology is complicated because personal preference, lighting, saturation, culture and context all matter.

Another 2025 experimental study found different stress responses depending on specific wall colors, which is another good reminder that no single color palette works universally.

So no, raspberry paint is not a prescription medication.

But I love the larger idea underneath the research.

Our surroundings communicate with us.

Color can change the emotional experience of a room.

Beauty matters.

Restorative spaces matter.

And I no longer believe a home needs to be stripped of personality to feel peaceful.

For me, apparently, peace has color.

Making Space for Creativity

All of this house clearing has also collided beautifully with another reset happening in my life.

I have been trying to return to writing with more consistency and less bullshit.

In Begin Again, I wrote about the strange cycle I had gotten myself into as a writer: consuming everybody else’s work, second-guessing my own, rearranging websites, questioning my direction and doing almost everything except simply sitting down and writing.

I finally had to acknowledge something incredibly obvious.

Creativity needs somewhere to land.

Not just physically.

Mentally.

Emotionally.

Energetically.

I have spent years being the person who gets things done.

The caretaker.

The fixer.

The organizer.

The person handling the urgent thing before the urgent thing has even finished announcing itself.

But I don’t want every square inch of my life assigned to maintenance.

I want margin.

I want mornings to write.

I want afternoons when I can make stained glass just because an idea has been knocking around inside my head.

I want time to read without feeling like I should be accomplishing something.

I want to walk through the garden and actually be in the garden, rather than mentally running through seventeen other obligations.

I wrote about wanting exactly that when I shared why I was stepping away from some of the noise of social media in The Great Social Media Exhaustion Era.

I said I wanted to spend more time building a meaningful life than broadcasting one.

Turns out I’m literally building it now.

Room by room.

Closet by closet.

Flowerbed by flowerbed.

Funny enough, this reset hasn’t stopped at the walls of our house. I’ve been doing much the same thing with Glimmers in Chaos itself. The website has recently gone through a fairly massive overhaul as I’ve stripped away things that weren’t working, simplified the parts that had become unnecessarily complicated and rebuilt the whole space to feel much more like me. Somewhere along the way I realized that my physical home and my little home on the internet were asking for exactly the same thing: less clutter, more intention, more color and enough breathing room for creativity to actually happen.

And Then There Is the Greenhouse

Sweet mother of tomatoes.

This may be the part I am most excited about.

While all of this has been happening inside the house, we are also rebuilding and restructuring the greenhouse.

And I am damn excited about it.

Last season taught me plenty.

North Florida gardening has a way of doing that.

You enter the season with spreadsheets, seed packets and confidence.

Florida enters carrying a flamethrower, six thousand insects and weather conditions no reasonable plant requested.

We have dealt with heat, leggy seedlings, seeds that took their sweet time germinating, plants that thrived, plants that sulked and plants that apparently read my garden plan and chose violence.

And still I cannot wait to do it again.

Because this season feels different.

Not because I suddenly believe I’ve cracked the secret code of gardening.

I absolutely have not.

The garden gods would hear me and immediately dispatch something with teeth.

It feels different because I am creating the time and energy to do it properly.

That may be the biggest reset of all.

I don’t just want a greenhouse.

I want to use the greenhouse.

I want trays of seedlings.

Tomatoes.

Peppers.

Collards.

Cauliflower.

Flowers everywhere.

Herbs tucked into ridiculous little corners.

I want a big, lush, slightly feral garden overflowing with food and color and butterflies and experiments that may or may not behave according to their seed packets.

I want to walk out there in the morning with coffee and discover something bloomed overnight.

I want dirt under my fingernails again.

I want enough margin in my schedule that tending a garden doesn’t feel like another obligation screaming from the to-do list.

That’s the part I think I’ve been missing.

Resetting Isn’t About Starting Over

I used to think a reset meant wiping the slate clean.

Starting over.

Becoming more organized.

More disciplined.

More efficient.

A better version of myself.

I don’t think that anymore.

At fifty-something, I have remarkably little interest in becoming some polished new woman who owns twelve identical storage containers and wakes up at 5 a.m. to optimize herself.

I like this woman.

She’s weird.

She owns too many books.

She plants too many tomatoes.

She’s occasionally fluffy.

She makes things.

She loves her family fiercely.

She talks to chickens.

She gets distracted.

She changes her mind.

She drinks coffee while staring at gardens.

She is still becoming.

The point of this reset isn’t to erase her.

It is to make more room for her.

And maybe that is why I finally feel at home here.

The house doesn’t feel like a neutral backdrop anymore.

It feels like our life.

The colors are returning.

The clutter is leaving.

Creative spaces are emerging.

The greenhouse is getting ready for another growing season.

My writing schedule has room to breathe.

And piece by piece, I am building a life where the things I claim matter to me actually have somewhere to exist.

Books.

Gardens.

Art.

Yoga.

Writing.

Family.

Rest.

Beauty.

Glimmers.

Maybe that’s what home is supposed to do.

Not impress everyone who walks through the door.

Not follow whatever paint color Pinterest has declared spiritually superior this year.

Not stay perfectly clean.

Not become another project we use to prove we’re keeping up.

Maybe home should simply hold us.

It should give us somewhere to exhale.

Somewhere to create.

Somewhere to grow.

Somewhere that reminds us who we are when the rest of the world gets particularly loud.

Mine finally does.

And good goddess, it feels wonderful.

Something to Ponder

Take a slow look around the space where you spend most of your time. Not through the eyes of someone visiting. Not through Instagram. Not through resale value or decorating trends or what somebody once told you a “grown-up house” should look like.

Look at it as you.

What in that space feels like the person you are now? What belongs to a version of you that you’ve already outgrown? What creates visual noise every time your eyes land on it? And what tiny change would make the room feel more alive, more restorative or more yours?

You don’t have to renovate the house. Maybe you clear one shelf. Hang the art you’ve been saving. Paint a wall. Bring in flowers. Move your favorite chair toward the window. Donate the things that have quietly become obligations. Make a little room. You might be surprised what decides to grow there.