My Self-Torture

Watching others clean while I can’t force myself to do it.

Image by cerro_photography from Getty Images

I torture myself with reels of organization, cleaning, and meal prep as I sit on my sofa or lay in my bed and I long for the magic to happen at my house. My brain craves putting things in their places, saving time, efficiency, streamlining, but my body has no energy to do any of it.

My house is a perpetual disaster zone. There are clothes, toys, and random crap piled up in every room. Imagine one of those shows where they discover an elderly hoarder who hadn’t gotten rid of a thing in the past 40 years. There are stacks of newspapers, old phone books, collections of McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, and rooms you can’t even walk into because the floor is so cluttered with junk. That’s the sort of thing I’m dealing with, minus the valuable memorabilia.

It’s as if I am lacking the sort of gene more commonly present in women but not exclusively so that thrives on cleanliness. I’ve heard many say, including my mom, that they simply can’t go to bed unless the sink is clear of dishes, and that has never happened to me. I can fall asleep whether or not my kitchen is clean, whether or not my bathroom is disgusting. All I need is a clear path so I can get from my bed to the toilet without tripping and busting my head open.

My mom, who lives downstairs from me, avoids coming upstairs because the state of my apartment disgusts her. Whenever she ventures up, she launches into a spiel about how I can sit there typing surrounded by this mess. Why do I have energy for all my writing, crocheting, doodling, but not for cleaning, she wants to know. What’s going to happen when she is gone, she asks me. Will we make the same awful mess of her downstairs apartment as we have in ours? The thought of it hurts her, she says.

No, I don’t like living like this and I don’t feel comfortable sitting here, on my sofa, staring out into a room cluttered with packages, toys, and kids' clothes on every surface, including the floor. But I also can’t pick myself up and start cleaning it all up.

I can sit here and cry about it.

I can complain to someone.

I can look up ways to remedy this situation.

But I can’t stand up and actually start moving. I’m exhausted and I feel entirely powerless.

I also feel a tremendous amount of guilt for not having the sort of home that my kids could bring their friends to. I envy the families who “reset” at the end of every day, starting the morning with a clean slate once more. I wish I had that drive.

The mess overwhelms my anxiety and deepens my depression. It’s a heavy weight that keeps me down. It’s unmovable, unfixable, unfathomably permanent.

Yes, I have spoken to my therapist about it. I broke down when I flipped my phone camera and showed him my bedroom with the mountains of clothes stacked high and the boxes of clothes that the kids grew out of blocking the access to my closet. I don’t think anyone actually expects it to be as bad as I describe it and when they see it, there’s a certain amount of shock that they can’t hide.

My therapist suggested small steps and resetting the mindset. Spend twenty minutes cleaning and feel accomplished with that, he said. Once you start feeling that accomplishment, once you start seeing that difference, it will become a motivation to keep going. But here’s the thing - 20 minutes of cleaning is undone in so much less time than it took to clear it! It feels like taking one step forward and two steps back.

And yet, for some reason, I can’t stay away from watching all those cleaning videos, where the montage is cobbled together to make the process look so effortless, accompanied by all of its ASMR sounds of closing drawers and pouring cereal into clear containers. I watch rug cleaning videos where they soap up and powerwash and squeegy out black debris from the rugs. Those videos where people unpack and put away all of their groceries in their pristine fridges in perfectly organized airlocked containers.

And it reminds me a little bit of when I was a teen and not knowing how to deal with my anxiety, I cut myself. This is a new, lazier, 21st-century version of cutting myself - watching someone’s “daily reset” before bed and envying them for the energy they have to accomplish it.

I’m not lacking a desire to have a spotless house. I’m not even lacking the incentive - there are many! I’d love to have people over for the holidays when we have nutcrackers and the snow village up. But, I’m lacking the drive to get up off my ass and get started. I’m lacking follow-through to continue on with it after one corner looks clean. And the thought of having to constantly maintain it, day after day, is entirely overwhelming.

I’d like to think that if only I wasn’t dealing with depression and anxiety, I would have less trouble with it. That maybe if the kids weren’t constantly leaving their crap all over the place, there would be far less for me to pick up. If I could just find more time in the day to get all the shit down and get enough rest too.

But the truth is, it feels more like an incurable defect than a mental health crisis.

I’ve never had a clean room as a child unless my mom cleaned it for me. As a teenager, I would shove stuff in the closet when people came over. When I had my own apartment, I was barely able to make it presentable when people came over, even though I was the only one making a mess. And since I’ve been married, I can’t remember a single point in time when the entire apartment was truly clean.

What if this is just the way I am made, and I can’t be rebuilt, as there’s no such technology?

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