I recently discovered that I suffer from a very real condition.

It’s called junk blindness.

This is not in the DSM (yet), but if it were, my office would be the case study.

You see, no matter how many times I “clean” my workspace, paper abounds. It multiplies. It migrates. It reproduces when I’m not looking. I’m fairly certain it’s alive.

I’ll walk in with the purest of intentions. Today is the day.
I’ll recycle. I’ll file. I’ll conquer.

Twenty minutes later, I’ve reorganized three Post-it notes, found a pen I lost in 2019, reread an old memo for nostalgia, and somehow made things worse.

And now tax season is approaching, which means my office is about to enter its villain era. Receipts will emerge from drawers. Forms will arrive in thick, serious envelopes. Statements will stack themselves while I sleep. It will absolutely get worse before I even pretend to make it better.

But here’s the thing. We all have that one spot.

Maybe it’s a chair that no longer functions as furniture but as a clothes archive. Maybe it’s a kitchen island that has quietly resigned from food prep and gone full mailroom. Maybe it’s your entryway, bathroom counter, basement, or that mysterious corner where things go to “rest.”

Every home has a designated dumping ground. Some of us have several.

What’s fascinating (and mildly horrifying) is how quickly we adapt to it.

At first, you notice the pile. You step around it. You feel a twinge of shame. You tell yourself you’ll handle it this weekend.

Then one day, you walk right past the mountain of unopened mail or the leaning tower of shoes and don’t even register it.

It blends in.

Your brain edits it out like a bad background extra.

Congratulations! You are now junk blind.

Junk blindness is what happens when clutter becomes part of the landscape. It’s not laziness. It’s neuroscience. Our brains are excellent at filtering out familiar stimuli. Once something has been there long enough, it stops setting off alarms. The mess becomes wallpaper.

Which explains why I can sit in my office, surrounded by paper that looks like it’s staging a quiet coup, and think, This feels fine.

It is not fine.

But it feels fine.

The problem with junk blindness isn’t just aesthetics. It’s that clutter carries invisible weight. Each pile represents deferred decisions. Each stack whispers, Don’t forget about me. Even when we’re not consciously noticing it, our nervous systems are keeping score.

And yet there’s also something deeply human about it.

Our piles tell stories. They hold projects, intentions, half-finished ideas, things we meant to come back to. That chair of clothes? That’s not mess. That’s a visual diary of your week.

My office paper situation is basically a documentary about my professional life.

So no, I’m not aiming for minimalist perfection. I’m aiming for awareness.

Sometimes that means actually cleaning. Sometimes it just means standing in the doorway, looking directly at the chaos, and saying, Ah. There you are.

Because the opposite of junk blindness isn’t spotless counters.

It’s noticing.

Noticing what we accumulate.
Noticing what we postpone.
Noticing what we carry around in physical form because we don’t yet know where else to put it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a recycling bin, three manila folders, and a tax document that’s been “temporarily” living on my desk since October.

Wish me luck.