Unfuck Your Habitat

facelessvirtue:

I started this blog because it’s finally gotten too embarrassing for my regular blog, and being able to post about it is a decent chunk of my motivation. I’ve been dealing with some issues over there anyway, and didn’t want to dump this on it, too.

There will probably be some profanity. There will be pictures, eventually, and maybe some videos. There’s going to be a lot of talks about depression - I haven’t seen a doctor about it, because antidepressants terrify me, but I think I have bipolar disorder or PMDD or both. Just an FYI, if anyone feels like following the progress. I’m going to try to post a little something every night in the 10 part of the 20/10. I probably won’t always tag it with #ufyh because I don’t want to inundate the bosslady with a thousand short progress posts.

This one, though, there’s no progress. This is the starting line. I’m a big-picture, always-looking-forward kind of person. I usually look at a mess and think “this will be so nice when it’s clean” rather than “this is a mess and I need to clean it.” I’m good at ignoring the present, or the amount of work it will take to achieve a long-term goal (getting in shape, writing any of the barely-started books, etc).

I can’t do that anymore here. It is seriously fucking with my head. This is Day 0, evaluating the mess and how it’s affecting both myself and my boyfriend.

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It’s finally reached the breaking point. The place is such a mess I’m in a near-permanent depression.

There’s barely enough floorspace in the bedroom to walk to our respective sides of the bed. It hasn’t been vacuumed since we moved here in April. The “dresser top” stuff - makeup, jewelry box, etc - are still in a box sitting on the dresser. The box of pictures and misc stuff to hang on the walls has sat in the corner since the move. Under the bed, there’s a tangle of space bags and garbage bags, and I have no idea what’s in any of them. The closet is the only thing that’s any semblance of clean, as it was the last thing I worked on before this major slump hit. And even then, it’s not done, because the shoe organizer is at my parents’ house getting resized in my dad’s workshop. The bookshelf is pretty neat too, but a lot of random objects have piled up on the shelves.

The kitchen… a lot of it is haphazard and however it fell during unpacking. We’re not really using our cabinet space well, and we let dishes go for days on end. For about a week, I had the “don’t let dirty dishes touch the bottom of the sink” thing going, but that’s long stopped being the status quo. Because of the stupid sorting procedures for recycling, we take stuff down to the plant ourselves, but this usually only occurs when we completely fill the bins and it starts to take over the counters with the dirty dishes. A big goal here is to rearrange the pantry and cabinets so that we’re maximizing storage space, as there isn’t a lot. (the ‘pantry’ is a tall, narrow Ikea cabinet I’ve had forever. It used to house my art supplies, now it holds everything too tall to fit in the built-in cabinets)

The bathroom is ok, for the most part. The linen closet could be reevaluated and maximized for storage, but it’s otherwise in decent shape.

The living room. Hoo boy. Ok, so, there is a leak in our ceiling that supposedly, the landlord is having repaired. People came to evaluate it about a month ago, but I haven’t heard from them since. And since the rainstorm two nights ago brought TWO QUARTS of water into the place (aren’t buckets with volume markers fun?), it’s safe to say they haven’t been working on it while we’re out of the house. That leak is responsible for at least some of the fuckery. Everything from that corner has been moved away, and since it’s near a closet (that also just started leaking, oh joy), we emptied the shelf. I’m tempted to move more of the stuff out of there, except there’s nowhere for it to go. There are 6-8 boxes we still haven’t unpacked from the initial move, and 6-8 more, plus two ginormous duffle bags, full of my boyfriend’s stuff that we moved out of his house a couple weeks ago. Between all of that, and the fact that I have a few boxes of stuff for my Etsy shop sitting around waiting to get cleaned and photographed…there’s about 6 square feet of floorspace in an 12x18 room.

It’s fucking depressing. I come home every night and slowly sink, and I wake up in the morning not wanting to get out of bed or do anything, because it’s just overwhelming.
My job can be stressful, and I don’t like it in general, but when my mood is better THERE than at home, where I can wear comfy clothes and do what I want… something’s wrong.
Boyfriend’s been snappy and grouchy lately, having a lot of issues with his acid reflux. At first, we thought it was from stresses at his job plus the start of another semester, but now I’m starting to suspect it’s the state of this place as well. He crashes early, asleep and dead to the world before midnight when we usually go to bed between 12-1.

This whole thing is just a mess and finally reaching the point where I can’t find the motivation to do even a 20/10, and frankly, that’s really scary.

I want this place to be better so bad, so that we’re only inconvenienced by the leak, not everything else on top of it. It’s embarrassing, and it’s probably the worst it’s ever been. I want it to stop.

Right now, I’ve got to get in a shower and head off to work, but tonight when I’m home, I’ll try to make myself do a 20/10 somewhere. At the very least, I’ll take some pictures.

It’s almost funny - I used to skim over the posts of pep talks for Way Fucked ducklings, and now I need one myself.

OK, people. We have a newbie in need of cheerleading. I know they can do it, you know they can do it, but let’s get them started right. I can’t wait to hear what the first 20/10 was.