Unfuck Your Habitat

pressureonpeople:

As a college student right at the end of my third semester, it’s really hard for me to get stuff done. I grew up in an environment where my mother cleaned everything for my brother and me. She worked full time, went to school full time, still came home and made dinner, and somehow managed to clean our rooms. However, my mother was (and still is) a hoarder, and only cleaned sporadically. It’s been that way up until I moved out, and my room has always been a huge, huge mess. I never learned the proper skills to clean up after myself. Even now, a year after I moved out, I struggle with cleaning and developing any kind of good habits. I’m eating better, fortunately, and I’m trying to make a regular exercise schedule. Sleep? That, on the other hand, is rather crazy. I go to bed early on Sundays/Mondays, because Mondays/Tuesdays are my laundry days. And because I’m doing all that laundry anyway, I figured, “Might as well do weekly cleaning.” So during those two days, I do the dishes, sweep/mop the floors, clean off the counters, clean my room, and clean my bathroom. Since both of my roommates are always so busy and my schedule is unpredictable, we never have time to maintain cleanliness. There’s just clutter. Everywhere.

But those two days a week are all I need to make sure that I don’t dive straight into the same habits I observed from my mother. I was, up until recently, the messiest person I knew. Everything got thrown onto the floor. For the most part, that’s still the case, but I’ve been working on changing my habits. Little by little, I’ve been changing the way I operate around the house.

When I moved from one room into a smaller one in the house, I had very limited room for what I had. So a lot of my junk just went in boxes and bags and I threw it into the closet. Everything else ended up on my dresser. After a while, both ended up looking like this:

These were the worst parts in my room. I could manage cleaning the desk and the floor and keeping my bed clean. I’d been meaning, for a long time, to clean my shit and get those two things organized, but looking at them was horrendous. I figured I would do a little bit at a time. But I had an entire week to do that closet, and I had only been out of the house three days out of that week. There was no excuse, in my opinion, for it to be that way other than lack of motivation.

Today, when I posted a status update about getting things done around the house, a friend of mine asked me if I needed help getting more organized and getting motivation. I told her I did, and she sent me the link to Unfuck Your Habitat. After reading through it for about an hour and trying to gather up the courage to tackle those things which I did not want to tackle, I decided to set the clock for twenty minutes and go at it. If I couldn’t finish it in that time, then oh well. There was always tomorrow to get it done.

In fifteen minutes, I finished cleaning out the closet.

I immediately took the trash out and came back in to do my dresser. I went over the time by about five minutes, but that was fine. I silenced my phone’s alarm and kept working, determined to get my dresser done. I cleared out my towel drawer and decided to just hang my towels up in the bathroom, or maybe pile them neatly on the dresser after I wiped it down. I wanted that drawer for odds and ends, like my tattoo wax that I knew I was going to be using again in a few months and a bracelet with a deceased soldier’s name on it. (That thing gives me courage; no way in hell am I getting rid of it.) After about seven minutes of cleaning the dresser, it looked all right.

That trash bag underneath it is full of “Goodwill” clothes, and a towel to catch the drip of the cleaning solution. Plus my Halloween boots, which I shall be donating after the holiday.

Unfortunately, I dragged a lot of stuff out of my closet that needed to be resorted — dirty clothes to wash and put away, two laptops, a monitor, books to organize on my bookshelf, things that I tossed on my desk to look at later, those sorts of things. And so now the rest of my room looks like a tornado hit it.

Thank goodness a very, very small amount of it is trash and most of it just needs to be washed and stored in the dresser or the desk. There’s also a bookshelf that can’t be seen that I need to reorganize. All of this, however, will have to come tomorrow, as it’s time for me to make dinner and get ready to go to the store.

Just wanted to tell anyone who followed me how amazing it is to have this much progress. I have one Goodwill bag, and I threw away two bags of trash/shit that neither I nor anyone else will never use. All that I have left is about 20 or 30 minutes of work to do and then I’m done cleaning my room. My cousin, who had been trying to get me into cleaner habits for a long time now, is going to be ecstatic — and so will my mother. Hopefully she’ll be able to get into cleaner habits, as well.