home-assistance

Tags

accepting help, cleaning, clutter, home-assistance, shame

today was home-assistance day. i hate it. not because it means i have to do household chores like cleaning and washing dishes. i don’t like doing any of those, but it’s ok to do it  together with the home-assistants. i don’t like it because i have to ‘socialize’. i have to ‘be in charge’ and ‘know what needs doing’ and that takes a lot of energy. then there is the ‘crowdedness’ of having ‘strangers’ so close. it is draining. i often have to spend the rest of the day unloading and decompressing.

accepting help is difficult, because although i know that i need the help due to my neurodifference, it has not always been that way. there was a time when i did not know i was neurodifferent, when the difficulties i had with cleaning, washing dishes, going to appointments and such were labeled, ‘laziness’ , ‘slobbiness’ and ‘unwillingness’. all this created a lot of shame. shame that accompany me every day, and most intensely when it is time for home-assistance each monday and friday.

shame is a very odd feeling in some ways, as it makes me both want to hide three feet below the floor and at the same time scream and hit everything around me in fury. it is difficult to participate in the chores when one feels like an earthworm on fire.

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clutter boy 3

Tags

cleaning, clutter

by now you should have a pretty good idea about my relationship to clutter and cleaning. i am a clutterer and i am not very good at cleaning up the messes i make. i never have been. apart from the obvious it has an even darker side. my mother was a neat-freak. she believed in physical discipline. for the longest time the mere idea of cleaning caused me to panic and freeze because i KNEW that no matter how much i tried it would not be good enough. and since i knew i would be punished no matter what (even after i grew up and moved away from her), i simply gave up the idea of trying completely.

which is not a good idea. has ended me in a world of trouble more than once.

what can i do? asking for help is one thing. yes, but what kind of help? picking the task apart. sorting the parts and make them single goals. i can do the dishes. yes. i can wash the floor. yes. i can wipe cupboard doors. etc. yes. but i cannot ‘clean the kitchen’. or just ‘clean’.

so if someone gives me a list of tasks that together make up the concept of ‘cleaning the kitchen’, i can do it. with a little help in keeping focused 😀

clutter boy 2

Tags

cleaning, clutter, hoarding, OCD, trash

When a bottle of shampoo runs out in my apartment, generally it remains in the shower for any number of weeks or months until it has multiplied and taken over the sacred altar of cleansing, until it becomes hazardous for an ADD kid to step into the tub (without looking or remembering that he himself had neglected to take every single one of those shampoo bottles out).

So, still writhing in pain and crying out with rage at my most recent Tony Hawk Dove-boarding Extreme incident, I hurled the culprits over the shower curtain onto the bathroom floor. And as you can imagine, I’m now faced with a choice…

Either I let shampoo bottles accumulate to dangerous levels, or I hurl them over the shower curtain as soon as I run out. Granted, later on I generally put the bottles in the recycling — the trash turnaround rate of floor-dwelling Dove bottles is astonishingly speedy. So my question is this: am I alone in chucking my empty Lethal Luges out of the shower? Or are there fellow irrational beings who face this same problem? (from themacroscope)

i was evicted from an apartment 16 years ago because over the course of ten years i accumulated trash and belongings to a point where i could literally not see the floor anymore, use the kitchen or move around without crunching something under my feet. the stink was detectable in the stairwell and my neighbors called the landlord.

see i do know how to clean – but i get stumped by an inability to 1. see where to begin 2. cut the task into parts. 3. a fear of getting stuck in the middle doing something crazy like scrubbing the floor with a tooth brush or obsessively doing the same counter top again and again because no matter what i do it will not be clean enough. so i never start.

clutter boy

Tags

clutter

…crumple up dirty napkin and set on counter because your brain cannot be bothered to a) notice that you are holding a dirty napkin, b) think “I don’t want this, what do I do with it?” c) come up with a plausible solution to that question and d) take action on whatever solution you come up with. No, instead your brain becomes vaguely aware that you are holding something and that you don’t want to hold it anymore because you need your hands to rearrange the magnetic words on your refrigerator into the phrase “monkey butt suck.” The fact that you are holding a dirty napkin which should be thrown away doesn’t even register. Just “hands full, must empty hands.” The simplest solution is to set whatever is in your hands on the nearest horizontal surface… (from themacroscope)

i clutter. the above is how it happens. it just happens. like that. so i can never find my keys, my wallet, my tobacco, my phone, my mp3-player, clothes, shoes, jacket. i clutter. getting out the door takes forever. if i even bother to go out. i am beginning to think that the inability to find my ‘every-day-stuff’ is the reason i rarely go out.