Every place I’ve ever lived has had a designated junk drawer. As a child in Texas, my mom’s stash of Hershey’s Kisses, loose uncapped markers, and grocery store mailers filled our kitchen junk drawer. In college, my dorm room junk drawer hid crumpled syllabi, rogue soy sauce packets, and extra Scantron sheets. Now as an adult living with my long-term boyfriend, our junk drawer houses an assortment of random tools, shared sticks of Burt’s Bees chapstick, paint samples, and multiple half-empty bottles of MiO. Although I’ve emptied it out countless times, it inevitably refills, and I’m learning to embrace its presence as a comforting constant in my life.
My perspective on clutter and messiness shifted drastically when my family had to move my then-estranged grandmother from her Louisiana home to our Texas home after she suffered a stroke. Her space was filled with piles of shoes, makeup compacts, and a mess on every surface. We soon learned that she had been living with untreated bipolar disorder and dementia, and it became evident that her cluttered home was a direct result of her mental illnesses. This experience shifted my perception of clutter and my feelings of shame associated with it.
Having been diagnosed with ADHD at 22, my junk drawer has become a source of embarrassment, leading to feelings of incompetence. Societal norms around home cleanliness and the pressure to meet those standards have added to these feelings, leaving me with a constant sense of not having my life together. Clinical psychologist Andrew Kahn notes that this shame is common among neurodivergent adults and often stems from struggles with executive function.
Despite this shame, I’ve come to see my junk drawer as an extension of myself, providing a consistent and dependable space for my ADHD brain. Dr. Kahn also acknowledges that the ADHD brain seeks consistency and routine, and having a designated space for random items can offer that dependability. Visual clutter has been shown to be distracting for people with ADHD, making a junk drawer a functional solution to keep distractions at bay.
However, my junk drawer can also feel dysfunctional and unsatisfying, with the stress of clutter and the struggle to maintain organization. Cleaning expert Becky Rapinchuk notes that ADHD can make the task of organizing overwhelming and exacerbates perfectionist tendencies. This often leads to putting off the task of dealing with the junk drawer entirely.
As I continue to navigate my relationship with my junk drawer, I am learning to balance the acceptance of its role in my life while also keeping its characteristic clutter from getting out of hand. The deep-seated embarrassment around it tends to resurface when items with a dedicated home end up in the junk drawer, but I am working on reclaiming my junk drawer as a functional space for my ADHD brain, offering the consistency and dependability I need.
