(Side note: I don’t know how many times I have convinced myself I can grow sprouts and microgreens. I cannot. I love sprouts and microgreens. I keep trying to grow them. I have, on and off, for twenty years. Not once have I succeeded. I always forget to water them before they’re ready! Every single time. Some day I will learn that this is just not the hobby for me, but every time I think of it again I’m like a newborn child, wide-eyed in the concept of fresh sprouts on my kitchen counter.)
I did not grow up in a tidy household. I grew up in a house with seven kids. At one point, I shared a room with three other sisters, a hopeless endeavor. In retrospect, it was impossible to clean the room because there were too many things, and the things we had didn’t have a place. Some times mom and dad would tell us to clean the room and we’d sift through things and throw out the things that needed to be thrown out and then hide the rest in giant heaps somewhere so that the floor would be temporarily visible. I hated cleaning the room. It took hours and then the luxury of having a clean room would only last until Mom or Dad gave us the thumb’s up, and everything would fall out of the nooks and crannies where we had crammed them.
(My parents always blamed the messy state of the house on the number of children they had, which…fair. But also: we have seen the house since all the children moved out, and…yeah.)
I had to learn the basics of cleanliness as an adult on my own. The idea that every thing needed to have a place was a revelation: that if you had to constantly be inventing new places to shove things, you were, in fact, not cleaning up, but just pushing things from one place to another.
That is how I graduated from a wildly messy person, where nothing had a place, to an untidy person, who would occasionally stop before things got precarious and sort all the things into the places I had found for them. I still hated the act of cleaning up: nobody likes to interrupt one’s day for an hour to put things away. But I did like the aftermath. The clean spaces lasted longer—four or five days, before things started to pile up on the coffee table. And I enjoy living somewhere tidy.
After I sent that newsletter, I asked myself this: I have this vision in my head that being a “clean” person meant constantly engaging in the act of cleaning, a thing that I associated with the painful act of stuff into its place for hours at a time.
But—and those of you who are reasonably tidy are probably looking at this strangely—I hadn’t realized that if I was doing this on a regular basis, it would not take me an hour every day.
So I tried an experiment. I wasn’t going to clean a whole house every day; that sounded too big. But I decided that I was going to try to do one thing: every day, after I had breakfast, I would clean up the kitchen. That meant doing the dishes. That meant putting away the tea and putting the tea things back in place. That meant wiping off the counters and the stove and the sink. Just the kitchen. Just after breakfast. Just that, to see how long it took me and how much I hated it.
This tiny little habit turned out to be massively transformative. You see, there was something I hadn’t realized. Having a clean kitchen after breakfast meant that when I walked in to have lunch, I had a clean slate, and that meant I felt I could make a decent lunch, and then, it was easy to clean up after lunch because I wasn’t doing all the breakfast and lunch stuff all at once. It also meant that when I came into the kitchen for dinner, my brain didn’t shut off into immediate “no” mode. For a long time, I thought I was just out of willpower at the end of the day, and that was a constant source of us ordering pizza. It turns out that no, my brain was rejecting doing things in a messy kitchen.
It took me a few weeks to understand the mechanism. One of my unconscious ADHD adaptations that I developed is that I leave important things out as a reminder, because if I put them away or file them, I will forget they exist. This is why my ballot is on the living room table. The flip side of this is that when things get messy, my brain takes all the clutter as ninety-seven giant reminders and it shuts down.
Also, I discovered that the thing I hated was spending hours cleaning up a place. My brain is fine with spending two minutes to restore a place to cleanliness: I like it when things are clean, and doing things this way means I get a near-instantaneous reward.
I am sure that at some point my executive function is going to falter, and I’ll have to reset everything, but I’m kind of amazed at how well this worked out for me.
Next up is to clean my office (oh dear) and to try to see if I can get into a habit there.
