“the mess is relative.” [micro essay: psych/mental health]

I said this aloud as I was vacuuming my house earlier today.

For the past little while, I've been chastising myself for being too self-absorbed in wallowing to tend to the disaster that is my living space. I can tell I'm beginning to metamorphize into myself—again, and quite frankly not even a notable depressive episode of my ouroboric phoenix sitcom life—not just when I have the executive functioning to do chores, but when I start caring enough about them that they stop feeling like chores. When I start pouring my love into cooking, cleaning...

When it's no longer housework, but housecraft. The art of homemaking. The practice of domestic magic.

Which includes aero constructs designed to dispel dirt from the dungeon floor of my mini-boss lair. Which is to say, I was vacuuming my house earlier today.

The first thing I said aloud was: “What a mess!” Remember the disaster that is my living space?

Here are the contents of that disaster:

  1. Crumbs—the sort of miscellaneous crumbs that end up on floors, themselves arguably existing for there to be somewhere for those crumbs to end up;
  2. That's it.
  3. Okay... dirty dishes, I guess? But I'd washed them before I'd started vacuuming, so they have an alibi for not being present at the time.

When I realized this, I had to stop cleaning for a minute.

I thought of the grimy places I used to willingly take myself, often. The Superfund site I subjected myself to living in for years, the health hazards that didn't register to me as so bad... then at all, in that way new pieces of furniture fade from view when their novelty wears off, and you forget about them entirely even as you're sitting on or staring right at them.

Sitting on the floor... staring at visibly clean, visible tiles... and the scattered crumbs of a lived life, that arguably exist for there to be something miscellaneous that ends up on floors.

That's when I said it aloud... “The mess is relative.” and finished vacuuming.

I wonder what sorts of crumbs will wind up on the floor of my lived life for me to vacuum up next...!