Cleaning and Recovering
Hello! I'm back blogging. I thought it would be nice to blog again to document my healing and recovery. Over the past few days, I've been cleaning my room and I've made some good progress. There are no more dirty clothes! Woohoo! I've always hated staring at my walk-in closet as I slept... The only stuff I have to do now is reorganize a shelf and clean the rest of my dirty clothes. I unfortunately do not have any more clothing hangers to use, so I'll ask my mom for more later.
My room has never been fully maintained as clean. It goes through states of dirtiness and cleanliness, representing my mental state. Whenever I'm feeling better, I try to clean my room up so that there's less visual noise — allowing for more focusing when I do my work. Then, whenever I go through a depressive episode, the clothes, trash, and noise just pile back up again. It's an endless cycle of recovery and trauma, getting nowhere. But the endless... can end.
It's a matter of whether you allow the cycle to repeat itself once more. The cycle is an imbalance of positive and negative emotions. Both are needed to maintain a stable equilibrium. How do we shift this imbalance if both are needed? Well, I've started to make a rule for myself... that is, cleaning often, if not daily. I can dirty up my room afterwards; it will get cleaned anyway. What matters the most is when. It could be either within 2 minutes, 2 days, or 2 years after I let the clothes pile up. While it matters that it does get cleaned eventually, it also matters that we take care of ourselves even in times when we're emotionally exhausted or depressed. Sometimes, that is our first step to get out of the hell we put ourselves in. The first step in loving ourselves.
While my room does represent my mental state, it also represents how I treat myself. Like my room, I neglect my own needs—especially in favor of others. I go online and talk to my friends, making them happy, but I don't even take care of my assignments or myself while doing that. People say that our room is a reflection of our identities, and that cannot be truer here. So with my new rule for my room, I'll also make a new rule for myself: Take care of my needs as soon as possible. This would include doing assignments as early as possible, taking care of my hygiene routinely, and finding a balance between work and breaks. While I can do these at any moment, there will be some consequences of not doing them sooner. Like how a room may develop a rat or roach infestation after clutter, I may develop more issues like hand pain or insomnia after letting homework pile up.
I'm an adult now, going to college for social work. I'm reflecting more... wanting to change my old habits and adapt to new ones. Just because I've made a lot of mistakes and carried bad habits in the past doesn't mean that I can't change that. We shouldn't confine ourselves to who we once were but rather who we can be. So as a sign of love, I will take care of myself. Because "myself" is a human too.