Tidying the Abyss: A Practical Guide to Cleaning and Organizing While Exhausted and Overwhelmed

By Amanda Dodson

Inspired in equal measure by Marie Kondo and Pema Chödrön, a guide to tidying up in a world that loves to fall apart

There’s an abyss at the center of your home life. Your abyss might be different from mine – a partner who expects you to do all the housework, a chronic illness or injury, around-the-clock caregiving duties or simply the terrifying idea that life is short and doing the laundry takes forever – but it’s there in some form.

As a clinical social worker, Amanda Dodson has helped people peer into abysses that threatened to swallow them whole. As a chronically ill person and caregiver, she’s grappled with the abyssal beast herself. She founded her organizational coaching practice, Nesting, to help anyone who needs an ally in their homemaking struggles – and has reached 100,000 followers on TikTok with her organizing insights. Now she’s doing the same for readers everywhere: full of disability accommodations and helpful hacks, Tidying the Abyss is a journey into the domestic abyss and a practical guide to building a ladder out. By the end, the reader will build what Amanda calls a ‘nest’ – a sanctuary that supports and empowers them, and is shaped to their circumstances and needs rather than the other way around.