The Catch-All Drawer

What a missing stapler taught me about belonging.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

I love nothing more than wandering around a store buying new office supplies. Office supplies bring me such joy and comfort. When I left my last real corporate job, I took with me flowers from coworkers, my unused PTO, and an armful of Post-it notes and paperclips from a supply closet no one but me even seemed to know existed. Office supplies are my happy place.

I know we’re living in a digital world and standing on the edge of the AI cliff we’re all about to fall over, one that will send us tumbling into a new frontier of humanity where none of us will have legible handwriting or critical thinking skills and the last vestiges of traditional office life, including mini notepads and highlighters and thumbtacks and rolls of Scotch tape, will all be obsolete. But I’m a paper-notebook girl living in an AI world, I guess.

And though our interpersonal skills may soon be nil and we’ll revert back to the social abilities of cave people (if cave people had filters that erase any glimpse of an actual pore on one’s face), goddamnit if I won’t be using my time to scoop up every last paper planner and Bic pen and wall-sized calendar and sticky note instead of bemoaning the downfall of humanity.

I can’t imagine there will be much of a market for sticky notes and glue sticks when we’re all unemployed and sitting at home because AI rendered us useless. It’s hard to envision our future currency being color-coded index cards, but if it is, I’ll be sitting pretty. Even without a filter.

My love of office supplies comes from a place of lack. Meaning, when I was growing up, we lacked office supplies.

I know there are both big-T and little-t traumas in life, and I’ll admit that not having a stapler or Scotch tape when one needs them would fall under the latter. However, when you’re six years old and trying to finish your drawing and the marker dries up and there are no others around, that little t starts to feel pretty big.

Or when you’re sixteen and you have a paper due at school (a paper that was actually meant to be delivered on paper, because the 1900s) and you have no stapler at home to staple the pages together, that t gets a little bigger.

Now here’s a spoiler for you: it wasn’t really about the office supplies.

The lack of staples and tape and paperclips and sticky notes and envelopes and stamps (which I’m sure just caused Gen Z to hear old-timey circus music in their heads) was annoying when there was a school project due the next day and I didn’t have the basic tools needed to deliver my homework in an organized fashion.

But the real frustration, the real embarrassment and pain, came from what the whole thing meant to me in my underdeveloped, heavily insecure, and largely un-therapied brain. (Again, see: the 1900s.)

What it meant was that I was different from everyone else. And not in a good way.

My parents weren’t the people with a catch-all drawer in the kitchen that held all the pens and tape and rulers and notepads and random ribbons for last-minute birthday presents, like the parents of all the friends whose houses I visited.

I was envious that they had single-family homes and big backyards and their own bedrooms and parents who not only knew enough to have Scotch tape, but knew that it always needed to live in the same drawer so that whenever it was needed, it could be found.

My parents didn’t have the catch-all drawer. My parents didn’t have much of anything together, actually, other than my sister and me.

They divorced when I was eight years old. Much of that time is fuzzy in my memory, and what I do remember isn’t great. But as kids of divorce across the country in the under-informed ’80s did, I got up and went to school every day and followed rules and tried to make friends and pay attention and stay out of trouble.

All I wanted was for everything to be OK.

And in my mind, having a drawer full of office supplies was a sign of that. Because if you had a place in your home where office supplies were stored, if you always had Scotch tape or highlighters or staplers, if you never had to wonder whether you had what you needed because some adult in your house was on top of things like: Do we have enough paperclips? Did we grab Kid-Whoever a birthday present for the party Saturday? Do the kids need new socks and underwear? - then you would be OK.

It meant your family was normal. Healthy. Solid.

And you were normal, healthy, and solid too.

Your family had their shit together, and you would end up with a normal, healthy, solid life of your own one day. A nice house, a nice family, and no one scrambling to find a stapler in order to turn in their seventh-grade English paper like everyone else in class.

What I absorbed, through watching and listening and probably knowing more than I should have known at a young age, was that we didn’t have some of those hallmarks of normalcy and OK-ness.

And so we probably were not normal or OK.

And by extension, that must mean I wasn’t.

It sounds dramatic, ridiculous even, to have so much of one’s self-worth during their most formative years shaped by the contents, or lack thereof, of a kitchen drawer.

But we don’t get to choose a lot of what happens to us as kids. We’re at the mercy of our surroundings.

And we also don’t get to choose what memories we carry, or which pieces of childhood minutiae the adults around us may have been completely oblivious to that end up shaping our sense of self, our feelings of worth, or what we think is possible for ourselves in the future.

So rather than judge it, it’s more useful to look at our little quirks and weirdness and idiosyncrasies and ask ourselves questions.

Where did this come from?
Is this actually true?
Why am I choosing to hold on to this story all these years later?
Who would I be if I dropped it and chose to believe a different one?

I’ve done this work around the office supplies stuff, and around a lot of other things too, many of them bigger than paperclips and Post-its.

And while it didn’t change my life overnight, it’s impossible for me to say it didn’t change my life.

It did.

Digging in and getting to know who you are, why you do what you do, and then deciding what to keep and what to change and what to drop and what to do over completely is the work of a lifetime, if you let it be.

It was for me, anyway.

And when I need to remind myself of that, I grab a notepad from my catch-all drawer and write it down.