Living in New York City has its perks, but the size of our spaces is not one of them. Our apartment is not huge, but we have a walk-in closet in the bedroom (as in, A person can walk in, it ain’t a Carrie Bradshaw situation), as well as a good size supply/linen closet in the hallway near the bathroom. Up until recently, they have been a chaotic, overstuffed mess. Which is also how I could describe my life.
I am a bit of a packrat. I have a tendency to hold onto things, even when I don’t need them or want them. Growing up with Depression-era grandparents instilled in me the idea that throwing out a “perfectly good” anything was considered wasteful and evidence of how greedy you were to buy it in the first place. This is why I have hoarder tendencies.
I also have a tendency to forget what I have, because I can’t find it in the mess, meaning I will re-order things I already have. This is why I have four bottles of Windex, two full containers of laundry detergent, and approximately eight Mr. Clean Magic Erasers. Not to mention the duplicate skincare and hair products….let’s just not talk about that.
A couple of months ago, I had finally had it. I opened the hallway closet to get something and about 5 random bottles of stuff fell out, one onto my foot, which hurt. It had been ages since it had a proper clean out. I put some music on and got to work.
What amazed me was that I just…did it. I didn’t get distracted by a random bottle of lotion I found, or start hemming and hawing about whether to keep a bath gel I’d forgotten about. I didn’t feel completely overwhelmed or anxious. I cleaned the shelves thoroughly, as I have two kitties who are very fond of climbing around in there, and the fur situation needed to be dealt with. I found a bunch of empty fabric cubes and small plastic bins that I put to good use. I threw things out. I gave things a home. I put things in places that made actual sense!
When I showed it to my husband, I behaved as if I had climbed Mount Everest or pulled a rabbit out of a hat. I had done a thing of absolute magic, and it took me less than two hours. He was impressed and grateful, but I was elated. What’s more is that I have kept it tidy ever since, and I actually know where everything is!
While there are a lot of not-fun parts about this diagnosis, feeling like I do a little magic trick when I complete a task without struggle is a bright spot. I know it will stop feeling that way eventually, but while I still get the gift of these miraculous little moments, I won’t take them for granted.
My battle against clutter has been a long and epic one. As a child, my room was always a mess. I would start cleaning, but leave things half finished, as I would inevitably get distracted from the task by a craft project or whatever toy I wanted to play with. Any time my mother entered my room, it turned into an argument. There was always so much stuff - peeking out from under the bed, pouring out of the closet, stacked in Doom Piles. I realize now that as a kid, a day of school would send me straight into overwhelm. By the time I actually had time to tidy, there was just no way it was happening. I’d let it build up until finally, I was threatened with punishment, and would spend an entire hyper-focused but agonizing day of organizing and cleaning. I’d sit in my clean room and appreciate how nice it was. But once I started taking things out to use, they did not get put away, and the cycle began anew.
By the time I was a teenager, I had been told that I was disrespectful, ungrateful, messy, and lazy so many times that I started to truly believe it. I may have been messy, but I was not lazy. I was an excellent student and was in all honors/AP classes. I had an active social life, tons of extracurricular activities, and a part time job - all while managing the chaos in my home and the slow motion collision course that was my parents’ marriage and eventual divorce.
I don’t think it is a bad thing to give kids responsibilities, and I’m not saying I never should have helped out around the house. However, I should not have been coming home to a giant list of chores every single day when I was already overscheduled. I was in a constant state of overwhelm. In fact, chores became traumatic for me. I never did them correctly, it caused a lot of arguing, and no matter how hard I tried, there was still a mess wherever I went.
When I started my adult life, the problems with chores followed me. My roommates in college were all very tidy, and it created conflict, especially when I would do what I thought was cleaning to find that they had a different standard. When my husband and I moved in together, there was also conflict, since he has some specific pet peeves. We figured out that part of what makes our marriage work is our very Karl Marx approach to division of labor. This means he does the things I hate (laundry and dishes), and I do things he hates (vacuuming and cooking). However, neither of us are great at managing clutter, or detail cleaning. Thus, we have always resided in a space that is not dirty, but messy. You won’t catch us with a nasty toilet or dishes piled in the sink, but you may need to step over empty Amazon boxes to get in the door.
The irony is that I function better in a clean space. When my home is clean and organized, it frees up a part of my brain. This is especially true of my desk. The problem is that I always have six different side quests on the go. I paint for fun, which is messy business, and I don’t have enough space for a proper drafting table or easel. I prefer to write longhand when starting a play or an essay, and I have separate journals for each. I have one million pens which are always strewn about, some with caps I may never see again. Do I have desk organizers, you may ask? Oh yes. I have all the desk organizers. They are super handy for making even more Doom Piles!
I don’t like the mess, but I could never figure out how to actually fix the mess, especially if I was overwhelmed or preoccupied. I would walk past a mess 400 times, and my brain just doesn’t register it (which mystified my husband for years). When I do see the mess, I say “oh I should clean that”, and then immediately forget about it. If I do start cleaning, something shiny will catch my eye and before you know it, I am on a Side Quest, never to return to the original intention. This is all part of my executive functioning difficulty, and explains why when I went to put away my laundry (my Most Hated Chore), I often found myself doing something like looking at my old yearbooks or playing sparkle ball with my cats.
I am a big fan of Rich & Rox on TikTok - and their book Dirty Laundry is an excellent read, especially for neurodiverse households. This made me laugh. IT ME.
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I finally decided to throw money at the problem. My husband and I were both busy, having returned to in-person work, and I found myself so wrung out by the pandemic and my impending nervous breakdown that I had absolutely no desire to clean. I decided to do something that made me very uncomfortable: I hired a cleaning professional.
As a girl raised in a working class family, having a cleaning person was considered the Ultimate Rich Person Luxury. Whenever I felt guilt about the bougie-ness of it all, I added up the amount of hours it would take me to do the same amount of cleaning and how much that would cost if I were getting paid my hourly wage. It made me feel a little better. We pay other people to do stuff for us all the time - wash our cars, prepare our food, and mind our children/pets - but I still felt weird about this. I had to push aside my mother’s voice in my head - which despite my best efforts is still there sometimes - telling me I was a Spoiled Brat. Who the fuck do you think you are?
Despite my bougie guilt, I pulled the trigger. Rosie1 , our cleaning professional, is the BEST. She is the sweetest person ever, she is reliable, and she is really really excellent at cleaning. She organizes things in ways I would never think of. She gets my apartment SO clean, clean in ways I could never manage on my best day, not even with the hyper-focused panic of company coming over. She has given us gentle, but pointed, instructions for how she wants certain things done. Our fear of disappointing Rosie has made us want to do better. If we keep on top of certain things, she can do her job better. The day before she comes, we de-clutter, take trash out, deal with recycling, toss spoiled things from the fridge, and do everything we need to do to give her the best possible situation for her to do all the things we don’t want to do or wouldn’t even think to do. Like scrub the ever loving shit out of our tub and organize our toiletries by size. We love Rosie.2
Now that we have help, we have begun the process of changing our ways. Over Labor Day weekend, we finally replaced the huge, chunky Ikea bookshelf we have had for more than a decade and replaced it with a slimmer, taller, and more sensible bookshelf. It forced us to sort through our books, which was a long overdue project, and we got rid of quite a bit. We also replaced our beat up coffee table, which was always too large for the space. I have begun another clothing purge, and instituted a new rule that if I buy new clothing, I need to toss or donate something old. If I haven’t worn it in over a year, has holes in it, or I just hate it now - it goes. I used to be terrified of getting rid of things, and now I love nothing more than gleefully carrying down bags of stuff for the trash.
In my habit tracker, I have a line item that says “10 minutes of tidying”. I am not always consistent about it, but most of the time, I can find ten minutes in my day to fold some laundry or clean my wreck of a desk. I also do better in short bursts. I view my 10-15 minutes of tidying the same way I view my yoga and meditation practice - sometimes tedious, sometimes I don’t feel like it, but I am never sorry I did it. It makes it much easier to keep up with.
That’s not to say I am ever going to suddenly become a Clean Person. I don’t find cleaning interesting, or particularly satisfying. I am always going to be grossed out by cleaning the sink because of my sensory issues, I will probably always have to stifle a gag to clean a toilet or scoop cat litter, and I am never going to like folding and putting my laundry away. I had to reframe cleaning for myself. I do not need my home to look like an issue of Better Homes and Gardens, but I also do not want it to look like a tornado hit it. So far, my 40s have been a time where I am aiming to find peace and quiet, at least in my own home. Not constantly tripping over my own belongings is a good place to start.
Housekeeping (see what I did there?)
My brilliant husband started his very own Substack - called Getting Here - and his first post is about the dystopian bromance between Trump and tech billionaires. Please subscribe and support if you like what you read! I am not saying this just because we are married, but he is one of the smartest people I know, and his insights are well worth your time.
I am going back to recording voiceovers. After some feedback, I have decided not to paywall them for the time being, BUT I am also taking pressure off of myself at the same time. So they might not always go up on pub day, and that is okay! This one should be up by the weekend, so stay tuned. I will post in Notes when they are up.
In honor of my birthday, I am doing a sale on paid subscriptions! My birthday is 9/16, and I love a theme, so I’m offering 16% off a paid monthly sub and that is your price forever! Only $42 a year (regularly $50), less than the price of a latte per month. And…10% of proceeds are still going to reproductive rights, in honor of JD Vance!
Name changed to protect her privacy, as I have a feeling she would be like “why is this crazy woman writing about me”.
By “we” love Rosie - I mean the humans. My cats hate her guts because of the vacuum. I mean, she VACUUMS, not the ten minute half-assed job I do. They find this displeasing, and they also do not like their belongings being moved around.
You slayed the Attack Closet! And much else besides, it sounds like, and you've managed to write about it with a lot of charm and actual kindness toward yourself, which a lot of people either don't or can't. Seriously, it's so rare to see. Refreshing, too.
This is a subject dear to my heart. One of the things I do in this life is help people get unstuck with their households (a process nearly always connected to Other Issues (TM) ) -- https://rntq.substack.com/p/reasons-not-to-quit-coaching if you're curious -- and starting in late December I'm going to be serializing a new book on the subject. Either of which may be of interest or not, since it sounds like you've definitely figured out a workable way forward for your household. If it is, though, let me know!
I don't have a diagnosis except what my grown kids tell me ;) but you really hit my memories on cleaning. Once upon a time, I was airbnb-ing the rooms of the two older kids who'd moved out, and I had to hire a cleaner because it was business related. And then I stopped renting the rooms and couldn't "justify" it anymore. That lasted longer than it should have. I feel the same guilt but I work full time, write before work, want to spend time with my friends, kids and grandkids, and there's no one to share the load with in my house. And I clean up for my cleaners. That day every other week is the best day, and the only thing I regret is that I can't afford to have them every week. Maybe soon though!