I’ve never been much of a housekeeper. I grew up in a messy house, as did my mother, and it’s hard when you’ve not been shown the way. As you probably know, I’m a crafter. I make things, frequently making a craft-supply tornado around my work area. I’m also partially disabled, I suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, foot deformity, and a few other things, and some days it’s a struggle just to ensure we all eat decent healthy meals regularly, let alone going back into the kitchen to tackle the dishes. My house isn’t dirty, but it is messy, and my oh my, can that take a mental toll.
We all have things we struggle with, mine just happens to be tidying and cleaning. When things were particularly messy, maybe the laundry was piling up, or too many craft supplies hadn’t been put away, I used to have this negative voice that went off in my head, and she was really vicious towards me, I can tell you!
Somehow whilst on TikTok of all things, I found this woman who goes by the moniker of ‘Not the worst cleaner’ and her views on cleaning and mental health have been utterly eye opening. If you’ve not heard of her, she’s a Canadian mum with a background in psychology, especially looking at the link between mental health and cleaning. She goes into the homes of poor souls whose living conditions are just terrible, because their mental or physical health has prevented them from cleaning, sometimes for many years. This woman is a living angel, and her compassion for the people she helps is incredibly moving.
It’s so moving that for possibly the first time in my life, that vicious voice in my head that used to berate me horribly if the house was too messy, has been quieted. I stopped beating myself up because I saw myself and my situation for what it was. A regular person with health issues making it difficult to keep on top of things.
Recently, the recycling was piling up in the kitchen. It was a few days after our big fortnightly grocery shop, which we have delivered because I can’t manage a full shop due to my health issues. Our local supermarket delivers their online orders in these tiny little Hobbit-sized paper bags. Just… so many of paper bags. So naturally they all have to go in the recycling, but you have to flatten them first, and after putting away the shopping I was just done! So, they sat there. For a few days. When I went to deal with them, something amazing happened. I sat on my kitchen chair and began to flatten the bags, and realised as I did so, that my nasty little head voice, was silent. I was just doing the task, not beating myself up about not having already done the task. What shocked me was not that this was a nicer way of living, that’s pretty obvious, but that it made the task so much easier. The burden of feeling like crap about something was lifted, and it allowed for so much more mental bandwidth to do the thing, making the thing seem so much easier than before.
I realized that so much of my mind had been occupied by beating myself up about being messy, that it was making every task that much harder. It was like doing the task two or three times over! Since this epiphany, I’ve found it easier to regularly tackle things like a daily load of laundry, or whipping the vacuum out to clean up after craft activities. I’m still a messy person, but my house is already noticeably tidier than it was when I was beating myself up about it.
If you can, I highly recommend going and watching some of Not the Worst Cleaner’s content, she’s on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok and she’s changed my relationship with cleaning forever. You might not beat yourself up about cleaning, for you it might be exercise, or diet, or work or anything else! But I guarantee you, if you stop beating yourself up, if you view yourself with the compassion you’d view others with, you’ll find it easier to tackle these things, and generally have a better quality of life! Be kind, loving, and understanding with yourself, and you might just find you’ve freed up some bandwidth to spend on those things you wish you did more of.
