My living space is a complete mess. Not that I’m proud of it, anyway. I’m simply speaking the truth. They expect to enter my home and see some reflection of my surface persona rather than the post-apocalyptic war zone that is my bedroom floor because, in my ordinary everyday life, I am six kinds of neurotic, well-organized, and generally on top of things. If you’re lucky, you’ll find little pockets of wrapped sweets that I’ve deliberately concealed from myself and delightedly rediscovered as tiny prizes on the days when I deign to actually clean. My clothes are continually out of place, books seem to miraculously crawl their way off my shelf, and my clothes are always awry.
Even if I’ve made some progress in the last few years in terms of maintaining my space, there is still room for growth, and I’ve always been happy with my mess. Other individuals, not so much. In college, I would spend days cleaning up before my mother arrived so I could maintain a tidy little façade for her. She is extremely tidy, so if she had seen my bedroom in its current form, she probably would have died a little inside. It’s a good thing we love each other since, pretty much from the inevitably chaotic day I was born, there has been a basic misunderstanding about how we spend our lives.
Having said that, there are some aspects of extremely neat people that I will never be able to grasp. To be honest, I’m not sure if it’s a healthy, pleasant way to live, and I know I’m not the only contentedly messy person who feels this way. If you’re really sloppy like me, you’ve undoubtedly wondered the same things about clean freaks as I have:
Why everything needs to happen right now, this instant
I have a reputation for putting off cleaning tasks. The fact that the reward is so much larger when you see the enormous dramatic difference and think to yourself, “Wow, I accomplished a thing today,” before going back to eating Nutella straight out of the jar and following celebs on Twitter, is part of the reason I put it off for so long. However, tidy freaks appear to believe that the longer items are left on the floor, the greater the chance that they may catch fire and burn down the house. You guys, it’s a coat on the floor, not a bomb.
Why do they feel the need to give us cleaning advice
I know how to keep my room tidy. That’s not the problem. The problem is that I don’t care. How they make so much time in their lives for the sake of cleanliness
Do neat freaks ever sleep?
By the time the day is through, I’m so exhausted that I’m lucky if I remember to take off my bra, much less store it neatly in a drawer with all of its other mates. I have a sneaking suspicion that those who are clean freaks have their own version of Hermione Granger’s Time Machine. (However, you know I’d use one if I had one to watch even more Netflix during the day.)
How they aren’t totally broke
It seems like neat freaks always have the most extravagant storage facilities, but you know those things are expensive. Because I knew I wouldn’t use them after the first week and because I needed the money to buy more garments I could carelessly throw on my floor, I couldn’t even bring myself to consider buying such products.
Why do they feel the need to save us from our messiness?
Confession: I eat and type. I don’t think I’ve gone to a restaurant in the past two weeks without my laptop. My little sister once admitted to waiting for me to leave the house without it so she could wipe the keyboard periodically for me, around a year ago. And while this is endearing and goes above and beyond what sisters should do, it is also a tribute to the neat freak’s obsession, which I will never be able to understand.