I cleaned my room today after like a month. I wish I had taken before and after pictures because the difference is ridiculous. See, what happens is that I'm very often in a rush to go somewhere, so I'll change my clothes and then leave them lying on the floor. I don't put things back where they belong--I just leave them on my bed and then when I go to sleep, I shove them on the floor. The worst part of this is that I don't clean it up after, say, a week. This is because when my room is perfectly clean, nothing out of place the floor crumb-free, I hate to get it messy. But the messier it gets, the less I mind that it's messy. Here's a timeline of the way I treat my room in the days after I've cleaned it.
Day 0: I have to hang my jacket up on the hook by the door so I can grab it on the way out the door tomorrow morning. I'll put my water bottle and coffee mug right next to each other on this shelf, exactly 2 inches to the right of my glasses. When I get back to my room, I have to take off my shoes and put them in the box with all the shoes.
Day 7: I've been busy over the last week so there is a pair of pants, a t-shirt, and a towel on the floor. I haven't had a chance to put them away yet. I guess since they're already there, it doesn't matter if I leave my jacket and my socks on the floor, too. I got some papers from class and I haven't had the time to put them a folder yet, so they're lying on my desk. It's not a big deal if I dump some other papers on there as well, especially that terrible math test that I'd rather not carry around and be reminded of.
Days 10-20: Pretty much all of my clothes are on the floor. There's not much in my closet at this point, and about half the clothes on the floor are dirty. I don't know which half. There's so much on my desk that I can't see its surface. I've lost several papers by now. Somehow my makeup ended up under my half-lofted bed with my half-eaten food. The food in the refrigerator is getting moldy probably. Well this is going to take me far too long to clean. I don't have this time to clean this.
Day 30: Not only is my room a mess, but my mental state is too. I should probably clean before I freak out and stop functioning altogether. (This is when I actually end up cleaning my room. This time, it took me two days and it was so overwhelming that I had to stop in between stages of cleaning-- clothes, desk, fridge, dusting, sweeping, etc.-- to take a breather.)
Let me explain this whole "mental state being linked to the cleanliness of my room" thing. As my room gets sloppier, I feel like I have an excuse to be sloppier. As the clothes pile up, so do the unfinished assignments. I stop trying to dress neatly because half my clothes are buried under more clothes. Everything is covered in a layer of dust, including my brain. In short, cleaning my room today was cathartic. It's a fresh start and I have no more excuses to make. My room has never been better, and neither have I.
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