Cleaning my apartment

I’m com­ing to terms with my apart­ment right now, and I hope this isn’t some phase. Basi­cal­ly, the place has been a dis­as­ter area ever since I moved in, and it’s still a mess now, but it’s start­ing to piss me off. I’m embar­rassed to bring peo­ple over to the apart­ment, and that’s no good.

This start­ed when I did laun­dry this past week­end. I made my bed with the fresh new sheets and then went to the gym with my friend Jeff. I got back home to an apart­ment with a made bed for the first time since Vik­ki and I split up. Regard­less of the rest of the mess, just hav­ing the bed made made a dif­fer­ence in the psy­cho­log­i­cal space i came back to, and that’s real nice, so I’ve been mak­ing my bed in the morn­ing ever since (er.… that trans­lates to «twice so far»).

I’m also try­ing to actu­al­ly clean and orga­nize a lit­tle bit at a time. It seems like such an over­whelm­ing task that I’ve avoid­ed it for a while, plus there’s a whole part of my per­son­al­i­ty that rebels at the idea of clean­ing or keep­ing my per­son­al things orga­nized. It seems like a restric­tion of my free­dom. Like so many oth­er aspescts of my life recent­ly, I seem to be learn­ing that I can be free to take on struc­ture, not just free from structure.

Any­way, I’ve been find­ing one cor­ner or one spot at a time and work­ing on that area until I have a place for every­thing that was there. I’ve done this with two spots in my bed­room and I’ve thrown away a bunch of junk and put a lot of stuff into recycling.

There are a lot of feel­ings com­ing up around this process. I’m real­ly becom­ing aware of a lot of shame I have around my liv­ing space, and it’s nice to take some action about that and have that feel­ing start to change. There’s a line of think­ing that says that my mess is an exten­sion of the mess inside me, and I guess the desire to clean up my space is linked to a desire to clean up what’s going on in my head and just val­ue myself enough to live in an envi­ron­ment that does­n’t look like a 15-year old ston­er’s room.

I’ve got a ways to go yet, but there is a spot in which I can stand where every­thing I see is mar­gin­al­ly clean. There’s a pile of pho­tographs on the floor against the wall, but that’s about it. And it’s sooth­ing to look at that area and rec­og­nize it as my own.

Of course, my desk could use some atten­tion, but I’m tak­ing this a bit at a time. It would be nice if I could start to have some of that sooth­ing feel­ing around being at my desk.

Part of me is telling myself that it won’t last and that it’s use­less and that I don’t have what it takes to have a nice liv­ing space, but I’m try­ing to grab that thought process and tear its lungs out each time it comes up.