Friends are coming for dinner tonight, and one of them is bringing a newish girlfriend none of us have ever met. What does this mean for my neurodivergent brain? It's time to CLEAN.
When I was growing up, my sister and I cleaned every afternoon and deep cleaned on the weekends. If you wanted to go out, both the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms better be sparkling. We lived in a relative shoebox of house, so this shouldn't have been super challenging. Our parents, however, were determined to live in a house with no inhabitants. We didn't leave out magazines, clothes, dishes, anything. If a realtor walked in, they could sell the place on pretty much any given day. We had a "formal" living room upstairs and a more relaxed one downstairs, but both of those were ready for guests at any time.
Living on my own, I kept up those patterns of cleaning every day. Which, when you live in a one bedroom by yourself in a brand new place is a little crazy. How much "stuff" do you really have when you first move out? No one is coming over, you don't know anyone yet. When Josh moved in, I kept to the same standard of clean, or at least, I tried to. Living with a boy is HARD when you don't really know yourself yet. I remember one night, my impossible (truly) expectations getting the better of me. Allow me to set the scene: I have the Scrubbing Bubbles spray bottle in one hand, a rag in the other, and am standing in the shower/tub with the shower curtain open. Josh comes in to ask something about ... something, and I explode. I am sweating. There are tears. I can't even tell what I'm yelling about after I get through the "you live here too!" moment. Lucky for me, he doesn't rattle easily, and slowly backed out of the room. At that point in my life, I was an inferno or an ice queen, there was rarely an in between.
Fast forward to over a decade from then. I am cleaning our one bedroom apartment in a different city for our Friends Dinner. Throughout the week, I am constantly amazed by how much dust can collect on surfaces and under furniture and especially the tumbleweeds of dog hair from our pup (short hair dogs shed more than long hair, something I wish I knew then :D). Back then, I would have beaten myself up the entire time about shelves not being dusted or dishes sitting in the sink for longer than a moment or bedsheets that were on the bed longer than a week. Now though, I operate a little differently.
Josh and I both have messes, it's who humans are. We have "stuff" and that can be annoying. We have both come to a consensus on the level of "mess" we can live with, and if I hit my level first due to ... anything, he'll come back into the apartment or wake up to find the desk to his office cleared of drink cans and wrappers. That's kind of my signal to him that his "stuff" has gotten out of hand. If I find my things stacked at the edge of the bench in our bedroom, that's his signal to me. I no longer beat myself up, I've learned to accept that the standards don't have to follow me if they do not suit me. We don't live in squalor, the dog fights us regularly on his bath, and we can usually take 20-30 minutes and be ready for friends to come over.
Today, I finish "cleaning house" on our physical apartment. The bathroom is the last task, but it doesn't feel like it looms before me. Taking the time to grow, to allow myself to explore limits, to go to therapy and do research on my neurodivergent diagnosis has allowed me to work on cleaning the "house" in my brain too :)
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