Hello everyone, and welcome to Part 2 of Can a Slob Change? If you haven’t already done so, please go back and read Part 1: Slob at Heart. In it, I outline what it was like to be a child with a perpetually disastrous room, as well as dive into some of the reasons why I was so comfortable in the mess.
In this post, I pick up right after my family moves to a new city and I settle into my new, larger room.
No More Changes
I wasn’t taking the move very well. People at my new school didn’t like me, and I didn’t like myself either. I kept my eyes on my small-minded goals. I was going to get all A’s, do everything I could to prove that I was the smartest. I thought that I wasn’t pretty, and I wasn’t going to even try to be since it would be a waste, but I could prove I was smart. I also thought that being a pessimist was just who I was, and that trying to be happy would also be a waste of time and effort. So I stuck with what I knew—proving that I was smart. It never made me any happier.
I’m not sure which direction the cause and effect relationship went, but I got unhappier by the day, and my room got messier. I continued hiding in the mess, placing my fears in it and using it as an excuse.
Crashing and Burning
My mental health really began crashing at some point and I got dragged to therapy, got many diagnoses, and all of a sudden I had to shift my focus from proving I was smart to fixing my life. It was at this point that I first had to start thinking about what would make me happy, and it took all of my energy.
When going through therapy, I felt I had even more secrets to hide from the world. (I didn’t, of course, I was just no longer hiding them from myself.) With this feeling, my room got somehow even messier. People never asked to come in anymore. They didn’t know what it would be like, if they could see the floor, or if they would have to try and step on the clothes instead of pointy things. But they knew it wouldn’t be clean. If my family needed to tell me something, they would stand only in the doorway.
Nobody wants to be in a room so filthy and so full of anguish. My room absorbed some of my pain for me, as much as it could. And it seemed that the more possessions I packed in the closets and onto the floors, the more it could.
Small Steps and Turning Points
I had conversations with people, about my inability to clean up. One of my friends tried to get me motivated enough to just take out the trash, which had been sitting there for months. He told me that I should see it as a metaphor, like I’m trying to take out all of the trash in my life. I was so thankful of him not judging me and simply trying to help, and it got me motivated to do it…that is, until I got home.
When I was back in my room, however, all of the bags of trash were there. I saw them and instead of grabbing them, putting them out to the curb, I just cried. I thought, “someone will see me if I put these bags outside. And there’s not enough room in the trash can for it all anyways, mom will surely yell at me.” I thought back to the time we were fined by the city for overflowing our trash and knew how angry my mom would be if that happened again, especially if it was my fault. So I did nothing.
Over the next couple of months I kept repeating what my friend had said to me, “I’m taking out the trash in my life, I’m taking out the trash in my life.” Month by month I got one bag out, right after trash day so the can would be empty. I was humiliated, so I tried to do it at night when nobody would see me. I didn’t tell anybody. Each month, my room smelled a little bit less like rotting trash, until there was no more.
It was still an awful mess, but I had gotten the trash out, and I was so proud of myself for that. It was a secret pride, since I had only confided in my friend about the trash in the first place, but I had learned from therapy that it was important to celebrate the small victories, so I did.
A Scary Future
A year later, one of my neighbors was having his home taken from him. He was mentally ill and a hoarder, and the state had deemed him unfit to maintain his household so he would be moving into some sort of group home.
My mom asked us three to help him try to clean up his house a little bit, just so he could find what he needed to take with him. We all said no, we weren’t interested. My sisters had gotten up from the table and my mom asked me again. She said that this guy really needed help and that she thought I really needed to see his place. She had cleaned my room a couple times over the years when I was away for a week or so, and she knew how messy it got right after. She told me that I needed to see, so that I wouldn’t end up like him.
I still refused, and upset, I retired to my room. I cried, and yet again, I hid in my mess. I was afraid now, of the world. I knew that I couldn’t live in my mother’s house much longer, and I feared that once I moved out, my place would soon be taken from me.
The tension was rising— I wasn’t a hoarder, not yet anyways. But I reasoned, if I could leave such a big mess with the relatively few possessions I had, (compared to actual hoarders) then it wouldn’t be long before I was in this man’s shoes, and forced out of my home— the only place in the world where I knew I could be safe.
To read the next chapter of the story (which is also the final chapter), click here to be sent to “From Slob to Clean”, part 3 of “Can a Slob Change?”
