Monday, April 27, 2015

simple things

Just about every aspect of my life is a jumble at the moment, so this evening I decided to return to a simple, basic method for grounding myself in a sense of sanity, and washed the dishes.

Keeping things clean has always come as something of a challenge to me.  Absentminded preoccupation lends itself to chaos; depression lends itself to squalor: Historically, my living spaces have looked like the corners of the cage of some enormous mutant gerbil.  It's always worse when I'm stressed or depressed, and over the last year I've been a bit of both.  Plus, while Chris has many excellent attributes, "tidy" isn't on the list, and it's been rather easy for me to sink back into a level of comfort with what I call "living like a troll."

In those times, though, it becomes even more important to maintain cleanly, orderly surroundings: It's easier to relax in a clean room because it's bright and pretty; you can take a measure of pride in having done even the mild forms of work required to make it so (and some days any effort is worth celebrating); and you get rid of the guilt for lying around in voluntary putrefaction.  Lots of win.  So this evening I checked off one more item on my "teacher-to-be" to-do list for the upcoming summer training program, and then went into the kitchen to tackle the dishes.  Which wasn't even that horrible, because I already did them last night (for the first time in a week).  

So at the end of the day I didn't get as much work done as I wanted; but goddammit, my kitchen is clean.  And that feels really, really good.

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