Unf*ck Your Habitat: You're Better Than Your Mess

by Rachel Hoffman

The important thing to remember is that there is nothing that can’t be unfucked with a little bit of effort and motivation. You just have to do it. You have to overcome the compulsion to sit on the couch and mess around on the computer or watch TV, and get up and do something. Anything.

For example, people with mental or physical illnesses or limitations often find that massive cleaning sessions or inflexible schedules involving intense bursts of work just aren’t physically possible. It’s not about being lazy; it’s about not being able to accomplish what ends up being a bunch of impossible tasks because of factors that are entirely beyond your control. The underlying assumption about people’s ability to do housework seems to be that everyone is able-bodied with plenty of energy to spare. That assumption can be pretty damaging, because everyone who doesn’t fit into that tiny little box simply gets left behind.

Learning that progress is incremental and not necessarily flawless can be a huge step toward getting a messy house under control, a little bit at a time.

Many people manifest anxiety or manic episodes with marathon cleaning. This isn’t ideal, because you’re only cleaning when you’re not in a good headspace, and you begin to associate the act of cleaning with being sick or mentally distressed. When cleaning becomes a symptom or a result of your mental state, you tend to wrap it up in way too much emotion, and it becomes an activity fraught with negative associations.

We need to learn to separate the state of our homes from our feelings of worth. Having a clean home doesn’t make you a better person. It just makes you a person with a clean home.

When you’re in the midst of a depressive episode, cleaning your house comes in on the List of Things You Want to Do somewhere after taunting a hive of bees and tap-dancing on live television. Everything is just awful.

Try to do something—anything, really—that allows you to interact positively with your home every day. Whether that’s cleaning, organizing, or even just displaying something that makes you happy, aim for getting one thing done every day that makes you feel better about where you live.

Reframe your thinking to acknowledge that the value in a task isn’t necessarily in its completion, but in the very undertaking of it, no matter how far you get.

It can be difficult to let go of this mindset, but your time is better spent working on your own habits; eventually, the people you live with just might come around. Until then, though, do this for you.

If you’re holding someone to your exact standards of “clean,” you may need to step back a little bit and ask, “Is it clean enough, even if it’s not the way I think it should be done?”

Spring cleaning for actual people • Keep washing your damn dishes. • Open a damn window. • Anything fabric that isn’t clothes and can go in the washing machine? Wash it. • What’s that gross shit stuck to the floor over there? Wipe it up. • It’s warm outside now, so take all your goddamn trash out. • Do you have a vacuum? Well, it’s not doing you any good just sitting there. Use it. Use it on anything you can: floors, walls, weird spaces under things. Don’t use it on your pets. They get cranky. • Is something in your fridge possibly gaining sentience? Throw it out. • How long has that light bulb been burned out? Just change it, for crying out loud. • Change the batteries in your smoke detectors, because fire is a terrible way of dealing with a mess. • No, but seriously. Keep washing your damn dishes.