Dear Kayla,
Organization. That is one key piece which you will eventually need to move ahead. Most people with mental illness are not very good at it. But it is a critical area which you will need to learn in order to move forward.
It takes years to learn how to properly organize things. By definition, organization is the ability to arrange things to meet your needs and fit the requirements of your own life. No one else can give you organization skills. You need to develop them yourself.
Also, organization takes numerous forms. Organizing your physical space is only one small part of it. My apartment is not well organized even now. Frankly, I haven't learned to do that one well yet. When I started to learn to organize, I worked toward organizing my time and my diet - not my physical space. But I can tell you what I have learned thus far.
My basic advice is the same advice I give over and over: Start with what you can do, not what you need.
Organizing your time means figuring out the details of what you can and cannot handle. You are probably - hopefully - working on some larger interventions even now. But you can't do that all day every day. Try to think of productive ways to fill some of your downtime. You will probably need to start small - maybe only ten minutes a day doing something productive. But once you learn how to do it you can start coming up with more and more strategies to use your time better.
The details of these interventions are specific to you and your needs. No one else can tell you what you can and can't handle.
The most important piece is not to compromise your main intervention. If your primary intervention starts sliding, put everything else on hold. This may well take some trial and error to figure out the details of what you can and cannot handle.
Organization is a major topic. I will be writing more on it later.
