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 �what is Man? a miserable little pile of secrets.� - andr� malraux "i desire to live in peace and to continue the life i have begun under the motto, to live well you must live unseen." - rene descartes note random entry image credit design by : ilazarn ikmal powered by : diaryland |
on being clean.
2018-12-10 @ 11:26 p.m.
i hadn't cleaned in a while so i did over the weekend and the whole atmosphere feels so much better in here now. then i was laying here, thinking about how interesting it is that we all have such different standards of cleanliness, how "clean" is so subjective. even within families. i love watching time lapse videos of people cleaning their rooms, and i love the freakish, voyeuristic pleasure i get from shows like hoarders. i'm not particularly invested in the outcomes in these shows, i'm just interested in seeing how people live. i consider myself to be pretty clean. i am messy, and disorganized, but i am not dirty. i have a lot of clutter and things that need to be organized but they are for the most part, out of sight. my mom considers me to be a slob in comparison to how she keeps her house. my brother and i have always referred to it as a "hospital," because she is obsessive about cleaning. i often remark that it looks like no one lives there, it just looks like one of those staged houses. you'd never know if not for the photos of our family and things that my stepdad forgot to put away. if my mom ever went anywhere (and took the time to visit my brother once since they've moved, but let's not get started), she would be horrified by how my brother and his wife live, which is almost intolerably filthy by my standards. i don't believe in wearing shoes indoors or on the furniture (!!) but i can't go barefoot in their house, the floor is so ugh. the piles and piles of cat hair. the stains and sticky spots on the carpet. the couch used as both a couch and a bed but the linens are never changed. dirty dishes and bottles everywhere. musty smell. but honestly? still pretty decent compared to some people's homes i've seen and been in. on the other end of the spectrum, the first time i went into mr. able's house i couldn't believe how modern and sparkling clean it was - my mom's house is a dump in comparison. and then, outshining both of those homes, i see these ytbers sometimes with these fucking houses that are massive, completely gleaming white, bathroom, bedding and all, and i'm just like, wow. do you really live there? do you have a 24/7 cleaning crew just following behind you and dusting the spots where you sat? i used to have a lot of shame around my cleanliness. my mom's standards were so high, and then she and my stepdad came down to visit me ONCE!! since i left home, after i had just graduated college, and she and my stepdad would not stop going on and on about how messy and disgusting i was because my apartment was ... lived in. they just went around and noticed that i had VISIBLE ITEMS and CLUTTER sitting around on my tables, some dishes in the sink, hadn't changed the shower curtain liner in a while. after that, despite never coming to visit me again, like, ever, in 13-14 years, my mom decided that i'm a "pig" and always makes comments about how dirty my home must be, or she'll sound surprised when i say i'm cleaning. that one happened last night. i had just smoked a ton of weed and rolled up my sleeves to start deep cleaning the apartment, and she kept calling me. i answered the phone and said "why do you keep calling me, i'm BUSY" and she's like what could you even be doing? you'd better always answer the phone for your MOTHER (sigh), and i said i was getting ready to clean and she just scoffed at me. i NOW know that this is all just her weird hangup that she has projected onto me over all of these years, but last night i was just in this weird headspace, cleaning like i had something to prove, and i had worked saturday and kind of just wanted to chill out. i had to say to myself, it's okay if you don't do all of this tonight. just because you're messy sometimes doesn't mean you're bad, or less of a person. even if you're really messy all of the time, you're still not bad or less of a person. it's okay. before i left my house, it was embarrassingly messy. i was so depressed, so many things had broken, i knew i was leaving, and was so broke. i didn't get things fixed that needed to be fixed. when people moved in, they brought a lot of things, but when they left, they took only what they wanted. i was surrounded by remnants of these families to which i had never fully belonged, and a home that i had never truly lived in. there were boxes, some full, some half empty, bags of trash, bags for donation, old food, mountains of junk mail. fruit flies. every time i came home i just walked by it all, avoided it, because i honestly was really struggling to accept what was going on. rooms sat empty for the better part of a year. in the basement, where we all used to sit together, cobwebs stretched from wall to wall. it was so hard to heal from what had happened with boy while living in that house. in my experience, what "they" say about your home and your environment being a reflection of the state of your mind is completely true. my home was chaos. i really did have to sort through it, mentally and physically. i really needed to come to this new place. and here, i keep it very neat and tidy, not because i need to impress my mother, but because it is very small, and i have learned which things i really need, which ones are worth keeping. funny, where one little thought can lead you. |