My mum had mental health issues from when I was eleven years old, so that’s why the house got into a real disarray…
Today on Lorraine, professional organiser and Lorraine regular, Dilly Carter joined Lorraine Kelly to reveal how her mum’s mental health battles made her realise the importance of a tidy home, before opening up about her battle with cancer in 2022, and why it has changed her life forever.
Dilly told Lorraine how her passion for decluttering stemmed from growing up in a “really chaotic household”… “My mum and Dad were constantly working and the house was at the bottom of their priority list” she said.
“My mum had mental health issues from when I was eleven years old, so that’s why the house got into a real disarray and it [just] got worse.”
“From the time I was eleven into my twenties, my mum’s mental health really declined. She was bipolar, and she was sectioned ten/fifteen times throughout my childhood, and the house was the thing that suffered. So my way of helping was to organise and to try and clear up. My room was always immaculate, it was always tidy, it was my little sanctuary – but the rest of the house was chaos. So I would do my best to try and keep it all nice and neat and ordered, and I just loved it.”
She continued: “When my dad passed away and I went to go and visit my mum, her house was in total disarray, so I started taking before and after [pictures] and I changed her house in the course of a weekend. I thought ‘god, I’m pretty good at this and I’m pretty good at doing this quite quickly’ so I thought ‘maybe I could make this into a business’.”
Explaining the mental health benefits that a tidy house has, Dilly said: “I think the most important thing about decluttering and organising is that it teaches you so much. It teaches you so much about being in control of your space and how an ordered house can be better for you.”
Dilly went on to explain how her ability to compartmentalise helped her deal with her cancer diagnosis in 2022: “Compartmentalising my feelings, the way I was, what I went through, I would think ‘right okay, well this is this part of my life, I now just have to deal with this. And, this is another part of my life… but for now all I need to do is just focus on getting better, getting through this moment and getting to the end.’ I knew I had a goal and I had a focus.”
“I’m lucky that I am quite a positive person. I’m lucky that I saw the light at the end of the tunnel because a lot of people don’t. I was lucky that I had a huge amount of support around me, because throughout my whole cancer journey I was working, I was filming and the episode which is about to come out now [Sort Your Life Out] was when I was going through treatment and I was really poorly.”
She added: “It’s been an amazing journey, but a tough one, as anyone who is a cancer survivor realises. You have this huge amount of survivors guilt where you think you’re surrounded by people in a hospital, that are really poorly and that don’t make it, so the fact that I am sat here today, on a sofa talking to you, doing what I love best, on a show that I love that is just life changing for so many people, is just unbelievable.”
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