I am a chronically messy and disorganized person with some pack rat tendencies. My mum grew up poor and has struggled her whole life with getting rid of things and accumulating things she doesn’t need because now she can buy stuff.
My dad, who also grew up poor, had a hoarder mother. He throws away EVERYTHING. He hates accumulating things unless they are small and easily stored, like DVDs. If he buys a paperback book, he throws it away when he finishes it.
To say I have a disordered relationship with stuff and mess is an understatement.
This was on the floor of my room.
This is what happens when 3 jobs, 2 cats, anxiety, full time enrollment, and a dysfunctional romantic relationship intersect with an already messy and disorganized person.
Best part about that nasty sauce pile? It’s in the trash now. Did a 45/15 and 3 months of ick is gone!
Baby steps, motherfuckers.
I know, I know, I still haven’t put up those before-and-afters from the kitchen… But yesterday, my mother and I finally unfucked the space under the bathroom sink! It was jammed full of all kinds of random crap, with the useful necessary things hidden behind the ancient evil-smelling shower gels and lotions*, and the hairdryer jumbled on top so that the cord would make everything else fall out of the cabinet if you tried to take it out.
*You can take this to mean “ancient and evil-smelling,” or “smelling of ancient evil.” Either interpretation is but a faint approximation of the true horror of outdated bath products.And now it’s nice and neat and the bathroom-cleaning supplies are under the bathroom sink instead of in the kitchen closet! Huzzay! (That’s the nineteenth-century version of “hooray”. I like it better.)
(Even more unfuckery under the cut, including a dresser drawer stuffed full of miscellaneous papers that gave me anxiety for three years. If this gets on the UfYH blog, I’d like a hug gif, please.)
I apologize in advance for how long this is. Holy crap. I’m sooooooooooo sorry!!!
Some background:
I grew up in a very weird environment.
When I was very little, my grandmother on Dad’s side would come over and clean because my biomom just didn’t do it. I was never taught to clean till I was a teenager and my older sister taught me what our Grandmother had taught her. At around age 8 I was told to clean my room with no prior knowledge of how and was expected to do it and do it well within a certain time frame. If I didn’t get it done before biomom’s timer went off, I was punished. Usually by shaming in the form of insults being shouted at me, “spankings” that were really beatings and my things being taken away in garbage bags. And having to help marathon clean the whole house.
As a teen, cleaning the house fell to me because biomom still wouldn’t do it, only now she used working 40 hours a week as her excuse. And my older sister had moved out to preserve her own mental health since biomom is, to put it mildly, really fucked in the head - as if you hadn’t already guessed this. As a teen (or at any age, really!), it was impossible to clean to biomom’s “standards”. She wanted a sparkling clean house with none of the effort. So she would leave me notes every morning of what she wanted done before she got home from work. And there is NO WAY POSSIBLE to get 3 loads of laundry, 2 loads of dishes, vacuuming and dusting the whole house, cleaning off two tables stacked and pile to the gills, get all my homework done AND clean the whole bathroom in 2 hours! Yet it was expected and I was punished if it wasn’t done - with dinner cooked and on the table for her. Punishment was a combination of childhood punishments, not being allowed to do normal teen things and more marathon cleaning. Summers were even worse because the lists were even longer. They included cleaning HER room for her, for crying out loud!
As I got older and had my own child, it was agreed I’d continue living there rent free in return for “a little help”. I naively believed that meant we’d finally SPLIT the cleaning and I’d be able to save up for a place of my own. Instead it turned into being forced to keep my space and my daughter’s as clean as possible because since biomom retired it became really obvious she’s a hoarder to a terrible degree. I tried to clean. Truly. But one can only marathon clean daily for so long. And when I couldn’t do it anymore - and refused to in order to spend time with my child - I was now told I was a terrible mother for making my daughter live in filth. I shut down then and just did what I could in my child’s room and my room and did as best I could in the bathroom and kitchen - which wasn’t a hell of a lot since I wasn’t allowed to throw out hardly anything. (Biomom was always in the process of “fixing” the broken things or wanted to keep old things for the “memories” attached to them.)
Eventually it got to the point where my sister and I tried to get help for biomom via her doctor but instead we were told that if the house did not get totally cleaned for biomom by us, Adult Protective Services would be called in. I freaked because I knew if APS got called in, they’d call in Child Protective Services and I was truly terrified I’d lose my child thanks to my mentally ill biomom’s hoarding and non-cleaning if CPS got called in.
So I called my best friend in hysterics and she and I spent 2 months shoveling out that hell house with Daily Super Marathon Cleaning. Because she was not going to see her “niece” put into the system because my biomom is nucking futs. We not only had to clean, but go through nearly everything in the whole house to see what could be saved and try to save my family’s history (pictures, handmade things, antiques, etc). I would’ve lost my mind if not for my best friend (and my Super Awesome Understanding Boyfriend who let me cry on him as needed and spend one night and day a week as his place so I has a ‘safe space’. I love that man dearly.) It was intense. It was terrible. I had anxiety attacks and nervous breakdowns near daily over a variety of things. Throw in biomom constantly berating us for throwing out things that were moldy, broken, useless, covered in dog shit, having to sneak out 3/4 of what we didn’t toss so it could be preserved and biomom eventually threatening to shoot us for cleaning the house out and it was beyond hellish. The trash man hated picking up trash from there because we had weekly piles that were at least 6 feet high, 5 feet tall and 4 feet deep in addition to the regular trash. (There was still a 12 foot long wall of trash at the bottom of the driveway when I moved. It was 6 feet high and a good 6 feet deep as well.) Also, I got sciatica from hauling so much out of that hell house.
At the end of that 2 months, I moved myself and my child out, again with the help of my best friend and another friend. Also, some emergency help from my sister and emergency help and funds from my dad and stepmommy. After 6 weeks of living with my sister, my daughter and I moved to the apartment we’re in now. I managed to get it pretty clean and set up after a HUGE weekend of marathon cleaning. I had to, because my dad and stepmommy wanted to see the apartment they helped me get with the emergency funds they sent! It looked pretty darn good, but was still very crowded and cluttery and I had a lot of bags hidden in the bedroom closet and a lot of boxes hidden in the living room closet. I dealt with all that, finally, at the beginning of this summer and into the summer. (We won’t even discuss how much junk got tossed or how much more than that got donated to Goodwill. I think I single handedly stocked an entire Goodwill for at least a year.) But even after that, I’ve had depression issues that have kept it from being truly clean - unless company was coming and I forced myself to do the dreaded marathon cleaning. And, of course, it would backslide and get bad again.
Why am I telling you all this? (And believe me, this is the short version.) So you understand how completely terrified I am of using timers to clean, why cleaning sends me into massive anxiety attacks and why UFYH has, quite literally, saved me and my daughter from myself. And my daughter from the issues biomom tried to give my daughter.
I’m not crying. There’s just some localized rain on my face.
I’ve been cleaning for hours and all I can see is how cluttered, dirty, and disgusting the not-cleaned parts of my house are. We have so much shit crammed into our apartment (most of it not mine) and there is so much to clean. Plus it’s going to be fucked up as soon as my partners/roommate/kid get back.
I want to keep going and get more cleaning done but it’s fueling a painful anxiety spiral. Plus it’s hot as hell in here. Stopping just gives me more time to see the mess in the rest of the house. Not really sure what to do at this point.
Right now, you’re looking at the big picture. For a little while, you need to try to narrow your focus a little bit. Focus on just one surface, or one small area. Take before and after pictures, even if you don’t share them. Sometimes we can’t see the progress we’ve made when we’re in the middle of it.
If your anxiety is being triggered, stop. Come back to it when it’s passed. Give yourself a set limit on what you’re doing (“I’m doing three 20/10s and then I’m done for today”), and hold yourself to do it. You will not be able to clean everything all at once. You shouldn’t. And not doing so is not a failure, it’s progress. You can do this.
First of all, holy shitballs.
I am a been there done that survivor of bipolar disorder and anxiety, and the messy house(car, locker, computer, life…) cycle that comes with it. When I discovered UfYH, I expected it to pass by my eyes as I scrolled without changing a thing. And for a while, it did.
Then all of a sudden, my grandmother was coming back to the house that I live in (HER house) from her half year vacation. The house needed to be clean, and really clean. And I found that instead of being overwhelmed by the thought of cleaning an entire house in about three weeks, I had a plan that was manageable even in the depths of my depression. And when an emergency made it so that I lost several days worth of cleaning, I still got all that shit done in time. Damn.
And the most insane part is the dominoes it causes to fall. I put in job applications, I cleaned out my car, I put clean dishes away while I’m cooking, I clean up messes as they happen.
I clean fucking logically, for once.
For example, I just decided that I was going to tidy up my room a bit, but realised that it was very hot and I would probably not be able to clean very well with the heat draining so much energy. So I thought for a minute, and it occurred to me that if I took a shower (which I needed to do anyway), it would be dark and cool by the time I needed to clean, and I’d still be done in time for Warehouse 13 tonight!
In short, a foul-mouthed blog about cleaning really can change your life. :D
i have chronic illness. when i am feeling the sick, it is seriously hard to do things. it is also hard to do things when i am NOT feeling ill because i’m all OMG TEMPORARY HEALTH I MUST NOT WASTE THIS PRECIOUS TIME ON ACCOMPLISHMENTS!! … but that’s an annoying and unhelpful way to live, right
so: this week, I was not-sick. and reading UFYH for the last few months lead to all this here happening:
- got up every morning at 7 for a run/walk even though it was blisteringly hot (exercise in the morning lowers my general anxiety levels, which makes existence waaaay more simple)
- cleaned the whole fucking house (the floors aren’t washed but they’re swept. and the cat box is cleaned, and the dishes, and the laundry, and the beds remade, and things were picked up and put away all over the place, and the surfaces are neatened, and some reorganizing was done, and little things that never get done but are actually important, like cleaning the cats’ water bowls)
- worked a full-time job outside the home
- ran errands
- ate fairly healthily (this helps to tone down my illness. sometimes.)
- went to class & participated (!)
- started knitting a new sweater for myself (and fixed pattern errors and made it in the right size, which involved maths! and did a gauge swatch)
- maintained relationships by facebook and text and email and handmailed packages.
- made good decisions about said relationships.
- had time to read
- had time to think.I’m not saying anyone else with CI can or should do this on their “good days” … it’s just a few words to say that I appreciate UFYH and its resident goddess, who brings to us swear words and compassionate level-headedness and knowledge of colorful hair dye. What more could anyone ask for?
ps.
The app is fucking fantastic. I made my roommate download it to her fancy-ass phone (mine is ultra-basic) … and we’ve already got six Random Challenge stars. Also, it’s beautifully designed!
OMG I LOVE YOU FOR REALS
so, i’ve been following “unfuck your habitat” for a while now, attempting to incorporate the hints, tips, and no-nonsense encouragement into my life.
i have two challenges - firstly, i deal with chronic illness, and therefore lots of pain, fatigue, and mental fog. secondly, i have major mental/emotional resistance to cleaning. i am usually very black and white about everything in life. i have ocd, so if i can get past the anxiety i feel when cleaning, then i want it to be perfect in an unhealthy way. my habitat is either spotless or a massive cyclone-like mess.
i think i am making some progress. finding balance has always been a huge challenge in my life. i’ve always tended to marathon clean, but instead i’ve lately been trying to do ufyh’s 20/10’s (only i’ve modified them for my energy levels to be more like 15/15 or sometimes even 10/15).
the kitchen is now half-clean (but completely functional). i’ve been able to maintain it in this half-of-how-i-really-want-it state for about 3 weeks now, while also cleaning any new daily messes as they occur (kind of a big deal for me).
i realized that my kitchen habit is changing, and i feel okay about it. not so anxious about it. less resistant. and i am starting to feel comfortable with it’s mostly clean-looking state. (sometimes when things are too clean i get anxious. it pisses me off, but that’s the truth. but then, i am always anxious about the messiness, so since i’m anxious either way, i’d rather be clean, tidy and organized.)
so, thanks ufyh. mine is another life you are helping to change. :)
