What is it, about a clean uncluttered surface, that makes me want to take a cloth and wipe it down? Is it the same thing that makes it so easy to just add more mess to a messy room, dump more junk in a junk drawer?

Why is it easy to take a fresh load of laundry into a neat and clean well organized bedroom, closet and drawers and fold things and put them away, but take that very same load of clean laundry into a room of chaos.. and it’s so much easier to just dump in the corner with more of the same?

Come into the kitchen with a dirty dinner plate, and the kitchen is clean, the dishwasher empty, and my urge is to maintain the clean, put the dish in the washer… come into the kitchen that is dirty, add it to the pile.

It’s like some physical law of like attracting like for me. It’s easy to maintain a state of cleanliness, it’s my natural inclination, but if chaos abounds, then chaos it is.

I used to be a very clean and neat and tidy person in my home, honestly. As a kid, you never had to tell me to clean my room, everything was organized. Not obsessive compulsive style, but I was happy to be neat. I liked decorating and re-arranging my room. I loved the feeling of being in an environment that was as beautiful as it could be. I might leave some clothes draped on the back of a chair because I was going to wear them again tomorrow. I was not a ‘neat freak’. But I liked my underwear folded and stacked by colour, and my sock rolled a certain way.  I might leave a snack plate in my room to put away the next day, but I never let things ‘pile up’. A little bit of displacement was fine, that was life, but I liked to maintain a level of tidiness, that was, well, easy to maintain. You never had to do more than a few little things to have things be just right again. You never let things get ‘messy’.

That continued into adult hood, I couldn’t wait to grow up and have a place of my own to organize and decorate the way I wanted. Home has always been important to me.

Somewhere along the way, things changed. For years now, it’s never been just a few little things to do to have things be neat and clean and tidy. The mess is always bigger than it takes to clean in an hour, bigger than it takes to clean in a day… I have no idea, how long, it would take, to organize my closets, my cupboards, my drawers and rooms, the basement, the yard.. the.. endless things. Part of it is having more space, yes, but a big part of it is just having too much chaos.

Where do you start? Why pick up something to put it away, when the place you’re going to put it away too is a muddled mess of random junk?  It’s going to be misplaced wherever you put it because everything is disorganized to start with, so then, you have to organize the place where that thing belongs. A 2 second job of putting something away in a cupboard has become an hour job of tidying the cupboard.. but oh, wait, half the stuff in the cupboard, doesn’t belong in that cupboard. There’s dozens of items that belong in dozens of other locales, each of which, you guessed it, is disorganized, you need to relocate them to another space that is going to be another big job.. and, it becomes endless.

Like those mirrors which reflect themselves endlessly.

I’m upset about it all tonight. In tears with frustration even. Why… ? I think it’s because I spent some time today organizing and decorating some Christmas things. Super early for me, I don’t usually put anything Christmasy up until mid December, but I was inspired.  But I think it made me more hyper aware of my environment. I walk around most of the time deliberately choosing not to see, smell, or think about, the mess. It’s too big an issue. It’s too much to do.  Today it seems to be in my face.

For many recent years, because of my depression and anxiety, trying to re-start being tidy and organized, was  just too big a stressor to take one, so I did nothing, as little as possible, to address it. Why? because it was just too big an issue to tackle.  Recently, I’ve started to have that desire to have things be pleasantly and relaxingly neat and tidy. For myself and for Wolfe. I’ve started tackling little messes here and there. But the stress has moved in with it.  If it were just myself, I think I could manage it.

I’m of the cleaning school of thought that it’s easier to rinse a dish or utensil right away, than to let it sit, and then have to work away at cleaning off stuck on food with 10 times the effort of cleaning it later.  Wolfe is of the, do it later is easier school of thought.  If something is laying about cluttering up a surface I need to use, I’m of the school of thought to take the clutter and put it away where it belongs. Wolfe is of the open the nearest storage space and put the mess in school of thought. It’s the easiest fastest way to get the space cleared in his mind. But, in the process, he’s just created a new mess, somewhere else. Do that regularly, and you end up with everything messed up. Wolfe frequently ‘tidies’ in this fashion, and then, we never know where anything is when we need it, and it ends up being so much more work to do what should be a simple task, like getting a pair of nail clippers. It doesn’t matter that I may have designated a ‘home’ for nail clippers to be kept it, if he puts them ‘away’ in whatever space is quickest access for him, it then creates a nightmare of never knowing where they, or anything else, is for that matter.

I’ve noticed, because of this pattern, we end up with several more of the same thing than we actually need. I bet, in our house right now, there are a minimum of half a dozen nail clippers… there are multiples of things we don’t need multiples of because we are always ‘losing’ things we need in the mess, unfortunately half a dozen badly organized randomly placed nail clippers isn’t solving the ‘problem’.. it’s compounding it. It’s the ‘easiest’ thing to do, just buy another pair.  Of course it ’seems’ the easiest thing, because locating the other pairs would be a huge job. However it really would be easiest if things just didn’t get misplaced to begin with. If instead we took 4 seconds instead of 2 seconds to put something back in the right place, instead of the closest place.

I know, all of this is mundane logical stuff, and it’s also no big deal, and I should just suck it up buttercup, but I can’t. I feel like I’m sitting on the edge of a place emotionally where I could really gain a part of my -life- back. Recover from feeling dis-abled from my depression and illness of not being able to keep house and cook, and actually do it. I feel like as if I were living on my own, this moment in my life this winter would be a huge turning point where I could reclaim my ability to maintain order, control, peace, beauty… cleanliness in my home and environment.  However, I don’t know, don’t think, I can do that within my partnership and marriage… I can’t reclaim those things when I have a partner whose approach to organization makes things 10 times harder to maintain than they would be if I were on my own.

It’s hard not to feel hurt, upset, and resentful. It’s then hard not to feel guilty for feeling that way, as I’ve done little to no cleaning for years, and he’s had to do it all.  How can I have the right to feel critical of him for behaving in a way I feel maintains me being ’stuck’… when that means I abdicate and do nothing?  If it’s his style of cleaning and organizing, the sweep it under the rug and throw it in the nearest cupboard style.. then I can’t cope… to me moving the mess out of sight has not only not made it better, it’s made it worse, it’s a bigger job later! Then I end up doing nothing, because if I clean the rugs, and under the rugs, and organize the cupboard… and then the next day he tidies by pushing it all back under the rug and into the nearest cupboards… those bigger harder jobs are recreated again. I can’t jump on board and do it his way, and so, I do nothing.

It’s both of us, doing what causes us the least stress in the moment, probably causing us the maximum stress in the long run, those messy stressors we create then trap us into doing less, creating more stress, bigger messes, etc, and it cycles into a place of ugly desperation for me where I just disassociate from my environment.

The question is, why can’t I do that tonight? Why is this stupid healthy part of me sitting up, and getting pissed off and wanting to have a healthy cleaning organizing lifestyle back? It’s clearly not making me happy. I’m crying, I’m anxious and distressed. I feel over whelmed, and I feel angry. I guess, I know that emotions like that exist for a reason.. they are natures way of motivating us to change a negative situation. The pain is the poking with the stick that can causes movement to happen.

So now the question is, will the movement be able to finally start to fix and resolve the situation so those stressors, those messes are tidied? or will the movement be a firm re-positioning of my head back in the sand? I’m going to go to bed and hide under the covers and see what tomorrow looks like, because right now I’m split between washing dishes and breaking them, but it’s hard as hell to just ignore them.  I know then how does it make sense to just ignore them… because when you’re being pulled equally in two strong but opposing directions, ‘going nowhere’ is -exactly- what happens.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 12:25 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.