Spring Cleaning

Very few of you will ever see my apartment.
I am usually hesitant to let even good friends into my place unannounced and will cancel plans if I can’t get organized in time because my apartment is usually a mess. I am terrified by someone seeing the mess my house is in, and I’ve recently realized that my apartment is a reflection of my mental state.

Right now, my apartment is a total mess.

I don’t actually dislike cleaning, contrary to popular belief. I find it rather relaxing when I’m good and ready to do it, but I usually have to get into the right head space to work on it.

I tend to leave it until I have no further options, or when it affords me the opportunity to procrastinate on something that I enjoy less than cleaning. If my apartment is a reflection of my mentality, does anyone else see an issue?

There are times when my apartment is so bad that you’re not getting through the front door, even if you have a fire hose, and my kitchen is ablaze. This is generally a pretty good indicator of the fact that I’m trying to avoid dealing with something, and sometimes it can take a pretty long time for me to be prepared to deal with whatever it is, but I am more than willing to let you believe that this is because I’ve been working too much to take any sort of care of my place, but usually that’s a boldfaced lie.

It has a lot more to do with the fact that mentally I’m a mess. It means that I’m trying to work things out in my head, and either I’m under a fair bit of pressure, stressed, or otherwise trying to cope, and all my energy is tied up in that.

For the record, I hate it when my apartment is like this. It stresses me out more than most people could ever understand; only further compounding whatever stress I’m under until I have only two choices, of either shutting down completely, or bucking up and dealing with it.

Right now, I’m in the process of attempting to do some work on the apartment, and give it a look. I want to get it organized and actually decorated enough to look like a grown up apartment. It would be nice to have a place that actually looks like I’m not a college student.

This, of course, means that I have a lot of cleaning to do, but it’s the kind that lands you on your hands and knees for the better part of a day to make any sort of progress. This also means that it is the kind of cleaning that makes the mess worse, much worse, before it gets better and the scary part about the process is that it comes with addressing a lot of underlying stuff.

Here’s to spring cleaning!