My Organizational State

I used to work at Organized Living. I helped a friend clean her room up once because it was so bad that people didn't know she had hardwood floors, and the cleanest part of her house was the stairs where there were books to stacked everywhere! I had to walk sideways to keep from falling. I loved that task of cleaning. I have OCD and OCPD, so cleaning is my biological imperative. If things were messy, I'd get emotionally edgy and physically twitchy. So I had to clean to myself balanced.

Since I've learned how to slow my mind down, I don't have this desperation to keep things clean. Compliments of four roommates who almost never clean like me now. I used to clean Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, but I realized that if I went one day without cleaning it seemed like I went months without cleaning. It got instantly dirty in a day but didn't get worse beyond that even if I didn't clean for two weeks. I mean once it got bad, it got bad, but it was futile to keep cleaning. As my friend, Erik, reminded me, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.

My coping mechanism kicked in when I couldn't afford to clean, and I became physically tired from all of the cleaning. That's when I reached my opposite extreme. Nothing was immaculate; it was complete cluttered. I'm surprised I could tolerate it. I think the reason I can is because when I slow my mind down, the very thing that plagues me to clean has been silenced. It turns out that I'm not an organized freak. I'm just schizo!