My great shame

I have a confession: I am a dirty person. Not the fun, kinky bedroom type of dirty. The I’m not having visitors today kind. The messy kind.

I hate it, and by extension, sometimes I hate myself.

Growing up, my mum suffered severe depression. My sister took on as much of running the home as possible, but she’s only 17 months older than me – it was too much for a child. I’ve always known I’m happier in a clean environment. I loved visiting my Aunt and Uncle in their always pristine home.

And I assumed at some point I would magically become a tidy, organised person as an adult. A switch would flick inside me and I’d suddenly have the extra energy to keep my home in the manner I want to live. I would suddenly embody the ideals of “clean as you go”.

But I am undeniably an adult now and I am devastated to discover that nope, I’m a slob. It’s not something I am going to grow out of. It will take work.

Am I as gross now as I was as a young person? No. I worked a housecleaning job where I was trained how to see the mess. It’s much harder to ignore it now. I’m also much more conscious of my health, so my threshold for mess is thankfully not as low as it once was. But it is lower, I believe, than most people’s.

Being able to recognise when something needs cleaning doesn’t always benefit me, either. Sometimes seeing the sheer amount of work ahead is debilitating because I know that in the time it takes me to clean all the things, the place where I started will be dirty again. So I don’t start. Which is stupid because things don’t stop getting messy just because I stopped cleaning them.

Why is this a problem?

For starters, because I don’t want my children to grow up in that kind of environment, and I don’t want this to be a struggle for them as adults.

Because it is a struggle for me. The shame. The paranoia. The sickening fear that if someone came over right now they’d see that my shower is mouldy and my stove has several days of cooking splatter covering the top and they would know that I’m not a good person. That my meticulous personal hygiene doesn’t extend to my environment. I have so much anxiety about this! I’ve talked for a long time about how I don’t care what people think of me, but I must. On some level their opinion does matter to me – and it keeps me awake at night with lists of jobs that I will never have the energy to get all the way through.

This is how I feel about my fitness too, minus the shame. I would love to get ripped; to have muscle definition and a belly that doesn’t touch my thighs when I sit – but the sheer amount of time and effort that would require makes it unattainable. I enjoy eating junk food while playing video games, not sweating profusely and being sore tomorrow. I do miss being fit—the same way I miss having a clean house twenty minutes after my children come home from school—but I’m not going to dedicate the time required to live differently.

There are two types of people. Type one are reading this and shaking their heads, thinking I’m stupid – I am my own enemy. They desperately want me to stop complaining and just clean the fucking house already.

Type two are checking over their shoulder, making sure no one sees them reading this, because if anyone saw them, they’re convinced their own shame would be clear to see. It’s for the type twos that I write this.

We see funny memes and tiktok videos about panic cleaning and “call me and tell me you’re coming over, but don’t actually come over” but no one talks about the mental toll. The wanting to care, but not being able to. Or the not caring, but knowing you should. The certainty that there’s something wrong with you for not caring.

(And yes, I do recognise that is a symptom of depression. I have depression, and likely always will. That doesn’t change or excuse how I feel about this.)

Then there’s the fear that my kids’ friends will pick on them. The fear that my real estate will kick me out. The fear that I’m turning into my mother and one day I will die and someone else will have to suffer through cleaning all the things I never got to.

Nobody actually likes cleaning; they just have more discipline.

Usually I like to come here with solutions. I don’t generally complain about things that are within my power to change. I’m a “do the work” kind of enby, not a snivelly little shit. I bring the pep talks and I solve the problems and I be my own damned hero. But not today. Today I’m just being real for all my type twos. You’re not alone. If this is something that’s crushing you and you think you’re the only broken adult who spends a day each month just trying to scrape their way back to a semblance of habitability, you’re not, and it’s entirely possible that your worth isn’t tied to your house-keeping skills at all. But the jury is still out on that last part.

Miriam Cumming is a failed house spouse, a parent, an author and a witch with a long history of depression and over-thinking. Hir life’s mission is to discover all the ingredients to happiness and teach people how to brew that potion for themselves. In the meantime, ne drinks a lot of coffee and hangs out with a face-slapping cat.