Yesterday I looked at the spare room in our basement – really looked, for the first time in years.
A rolled-up carpet lay adrift upon an ocean of shoes. An unidentifiable white metal something stuck its legs in the air haplessly amidst an assortment of coats and luggage. A stack of abandoned Brandon Sanderson novels whimpered off in a corner. And somewhere out of sight, hidden and yet present, a certain amount of cat pee waited patiently to pounce.
“How did we arrive at this sorry pass?!” I wailed to my wife.
“Well, it’s probably because we haven’t cleaned the house in eight years,” my wife said, trying to prevent me from rending my garments and adding to the mess.
An exaggeration? Yes, well, okay, I did not rend my garments. But the clutter really has been piling up for eight years.
When we moved out of our condo in Hyde Park in Chicago to a significantly smaller two-flat on the North Side eight years ago, we got rid of a huge amount of books and papers and clothes and furniture and then more books in an effort to squeeze ourselves into the smaller space.
But, as it turned out, we did not get rid of enough. There was excess. There was nowhere to put it. And so, in typical neurodivergent fashion, it just got dumped in the basement, willy-nilly-squoosh-aigggh.
We figured we would unpack and then sort it all out at some point in the near future. A week or so. A month at most. A year, at absolute maximum.
Time passed. More time passed. More books, somehow, came into the house. Also sometimes more shoes. And then sometimes groceries. And more cats. My wife and I eyed the increasing towers of whatever warily. Occasionally we would try to shift a box to the side so we could get from the front of the house to the back. (Usually there was a cat in the box.)
The basement did not get cleared out. In time, the upstairs started to look rather like the basement. The bedroom slowly disappeared under quilts and laundry and more laundry and also of course cats.
Downstairs, the pantry door became difficult to close because of the rafts of flavored water and snacks and less identifiable aging foodstuffs. My desk sank beneath bills and books and (horrifically) cat vomit.
The mess was so impressive that when a burglar tried to burgle us one night while we were out, we barely noticed because (a) they couldn’t mess anything up more than it already was, and (b) they literally couldn’t find anything to steal amidst the debris. They left with a couple of worthless rings and bitterness, I imagine, in their hearts.
Foiling the burglar was nice, but also cause for a certain amount of soul-searching. We had obviously failed as homeowners, and possibly as human beings. How did other people manage to keep their homes clean enough that they could be efficiently burgled? What was wrong with us?
Turns out, my wife had an answer of sorts. Over the last few years, she’s realized that we’re both neurodivergent. This is why my wife finds getting up in the morning an almost impossible task, and why I keep meticulous lists of everything I read. It’s also why our marriage is still ongoing after 25 years; we both have very direct approaches to resolving conflicts. Also, neither of us can remember anniversaries and neither of us cares. (We still don’t know when our wedding anniversary was; sometime in August? My parents know.)
However, our mutual neurodivergence is not necessarily so great for housekeeping and decluttering, both of which we find overwhelming and terrifying and from which we scurry away, much like the cats (complete with cat-like squeals of distress).
Recognizing that our messy home is just an external projection of our messy neurons has helped to reduce the sense of shame we feel about not being able to find the desk and the bed. We’re not lazy failures who lack gumption and aptitude. We’re just optimized for memorizing everything there is to know about Sister Wives and for making massive lists of best albums ever, rather than for…well, anything else. Or at least anything involving household upkeep.
Empowered as we felt, it would be nice to be able to find the desk and the bed. And some 8 months ago, we figured out a way to do that. Maybe.
In the best neurodivergent tradition, we decided to weaponize an arbitrary ritual. We would collect one bag of clutter a day, every day, until there was no more clutter.
I’ll admit, I figured we’d try it for a week and then get distracted by a fidget toy and give up. But! It actually worked! The desk rose like a breaching whale. So did the bed. We discovered that, under the books and shoes and cats, there were surfaces in our house.
We even made our way into the basement, where we discovered all the old pictures of our daughter we thought we had lost forever (hooray!) and also a couple dead mice our cat had killed (hooray?).
Now we’ve even forged a path into the spare room in the basement. While I’ll admit I am somewhat daunted by the sedimentary layers of I-dare-not-even-guess-what, I am also kind of excited to see the floor down there again.
Of course, while we’ve been throwing away the old cans of paint and broken suitcases and really impressive amounts of lint in the basement, the clutter has made ominous encroachments on the desk and the pantry, where something has maybe spoiled though we can’t really figure out what. But we can always circle back around to those, our one bag a day in hand. Right?
I wouldn’t say we’ve solved the problem of neurodivergent housework with this one cool hack – this is simply what working for us, and I’m not even sure we will be able to keep it up forever.
But for now, we have given ourselves permission to declare victory over the mess and avoidance and shame. And one day, we will find whatever that smell is in the pantry.
