Dirty, Messy Girl

We have to allow people the space to clean up their act.

There’s a running joke in my family about my messiness. Since childhood, I’ve been the one with the cluttered closet, the piles of clothes in the corner, the room in disarray. When my mom would tell me to clean my room I’d just take all the shit lying around and stuff it into my closet to give the illusion of a task, completed. She’d come in to inspect my work and side-eye the double doors threatening to burst open with a step in their direction. “Kristen Carol-Jeane, throwin’ everything into the closet is NOT cleanin’ your room!” She always found me out. To me, it seemed like a fine solution- out of sight, out of mind, right? Who was it hurting so long as it was tucked away, if I was the only one who knew about the mess behind closed doors?

Fast forward to my twenties, Mom would come over to my house, the one I shared with my then-husband, and clean out my closet herself because I’d continued with my little charade of now you see it, now you don’t, only now it caused real grown-up anxiety and overwhelm. (Looking back, I’m pretty sure it caused little me real anxiety and overwhelm, too.) She’d march right up to my bedroom and tell me to sit on the floor and help her put things into piles: throw away, wash, fold, donate, etc until my closet resembled that of a much more adult, much more organized and respectable woman. The new me…the pristine, clean, organized me lasted for a couple of weeks before inevitably devolving back into chaos. The cycle would repeat.

I brought this habit with me everywhere. My tiny New York and LA apartments, hotel rooms, boyfriend’s houses, cheer camp, car trunks and truck beds, suitcases, kitchen cupboards, bathroom countertops-all messy. I would get inspired to clean it all up and go on a tear, polishing every surface until it shined, neatly folding and color-coding drawers of t-shirts and underwear, and lining up shelves of books and trinkets until they were all in their rightful places. Still, weeks, sometimes only days later…chaos.

Can people really change?

I recently moved into the first house I’ve ever owned, one I built myself over the course of almost four years. It’s a tiny space, a shipping container house boasting about 320 square feet of living space. Everything must stay in its place to avoid disaster. I sweep twice a day. I wipe down the butcher block countertops and bathroom sink both morning and night. I wash each dish as I use it and put it away as soon as it dries. I hang up my coats instead of strewing them across the couch when I get home. I take off my shoes and leave them on the rug by the door so I don’t trek dirt into the “living room.” I change my sheets at least once a week and keep fresh flowers on the windowsill in the kitchen. I keep things clean.

A lot has changed since the time my mom used to come over and untangle my closet of clutter. For one, she’s dead. So, waiting for her to stroll in on a Saturday afternoon and save me from myself is no longer an option. This seems especially unfair. For two, I’m sober. Stuffing the uncomfortable truths into any proverbial closet is a recipe for literal disaster. For three, I like myself too much these days to live in filth of any kind. That last one needs further examination.

I spent plenty of time over the years analyzing my messiness. Why am I this way? Why do my sisters seem to have no problem keeping their rooms looking like a human girl lives in them and mine looks like a wild animal roams there? What piece of me is so broken that I would accept this environment? Why do I feel like I deserve dirty? Is that what I am? A dirty, messy girl?

I was in a relationship with an abusive partner for three years beginning at age eighteen. Rarely a day passed when he didn’t tell me I was damaged and dirty by some twisted method. He told me with his words. He told me with his eyes. Many days he told me with his hands. His beliefs about my unworthiness rang out over my life for years, even a decade later, long after I’d escaped the godforsaken thing. After that experience I felt tainted, dirty. He’d succeeded in convincing me that I deserved only the worst, that these terrible things had happened to me, that he had happened to me because that is what I was. When I quit drinking this particular experience was one of the first things I knew I had to look at. Really look at. Unpack. So much of my alcohol abuse was a feeble attempt at reclaiming power. I needed to be uncontrollable. In that quest I only became out of control, essentially allowing the bad man to hurt me again and again…and again. The shame of these entanglements is metabolized and takes the shape of all sorts of self-harm, self-sabotage. For me, that looked like a socially acceptable drinking problem and a disheveled space.

How then do I explain the messiness of my childhood you say? The closet-sweeping tendencies of my youth, before the trauma with the bad man? Well, I think it’s quite obvious. I was coping with something then, too. Anyone who’s ever had to come to terms later in life with childhood trauma will understand that it’s a complex and slow-moving process. Memories are blurry, captured in the mind’s eye of a child, compartmentalized into places in the brain difficult to reach. The truth is-I don’t know what happened. I only know that I felt an overwhelming need to stuff it, along with everything else that didn’t have a place to go, into the closet.

Some of you who follow me on social media may know that I got married a couple of weeks ago. Back in March, my sisters and best friend threw me a Taylor Swift themed bachelorette party (the theme is irrelevant to this next part but felt like a cute detail not to be skipped over) and after dinner we gathered around to play games. One of the games was to determine how well my fiancé and I knew each other and test our recollection of how the courtship went down. Who is the better driver? Who went in for the first kiss? Who makes the coffee?

“Who is the most tidy?” My sister asked the question, already privy to my now-husband’s answer and looking to me for mine. I paused for a moment, questioning the immediate response that came to mind, and then offered, surprisingly, “Me.”

“That’s what he said, too! Which is shocking to me,” my sister said as she laughed and kind of rolled her eyes. I realized in that moment that we stay the same, frozen in time to many of the people in our lives, even when we’ve changed. We evolve, we heal, we adopt new norms and set new standards-and often no one notices. More often, no one bothers looking for reasons why we are the way we are or attempts to understand why we seem to feel more at home in a dirty mess than the obviously better alternative. Even when faced with new evidence, like my new life partner’s observation of my tidy and clean nature, some people just prefer the old narrative. Maybe it’s because the old narrative maintains their superiority in some thing, preserves their idea of who you are and where you fit into their world. I don’t think my sisters mean any harm when they joke about my character flaws and shortcomings, I just think they’re missing the big picture. They’re missing the part where I figured some things out and decided I deserved something else.

I do think people can change when given the space to do so and the time to understand themselves and the clarity to see their lives as beautiful, intricate, and complex stories instead of just series of snapshots of their worst moments. I don’t think a messy room is ever just a messy room. I don’t think a drinking problem is ever just a drinking problem. We are all far more interesting than that.

Learning to embrace change has been one of the most powerful gifts of my sobriety. Learning to accept others’ unwillingness to embrace my changing is another gift. I am not held hostage to your outdated idea of me. I am not beholden to any past version of myself no matter how uncomfortable that makes you or how difficult it is for you to let me evolve. You are all on your own timelines, decluttering your own closets, and making sense of your own secrets. Are we all too hellbent on not being wrong to allow those around us to grow? Why are we so hesitant to make room for our people to show up differently? To be better? What can we learn from this resistance?

I can be new anytime. I can rise and fall and rise again. I can clean up my act and start another. I can travel back in my mind to the places that keep me from moving forward and clear the cobwebs. I can put away childhood fears with my fresh laundry. I can straighten up my shelves and adjust my crown. I can uncover the truth and blanket my front lawn with clover. I can make a mess and tidy it up. I can die ninety-nine times and be born again a hundred. I am not who I used to be-none of us are. That’s the point.