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I cleaned my flat.
A rather unimpressive achievement until you consider I've only recently surfaced from a very long stretch of depression, looked around at the wreckage, and genuinely wondered how the fuck I lived this way.
Okay, still not that impressive. I'll concede the point. I'll talk about it anyway, because the mechanics of how a reasonably functional adult ends up living in squalor happens to be the interesting bit.
The best analogy is what software engineering calls technical debt. You ship something that works but is badly structured, and you tell yourself you'll refactor it later. You never refactor it later, you've got bigger fish to fry. Instead you build more things on top of the bad structure, and now refactoring would break everything, so the cost of fixing it keeps growing while the probability of fixing it approaches zero. The codebase still compiles. The product still ships. Nobody outside the team can tell anything is wrong.
Depressive debt works the same way. An empty coke can here. A cardboard box there. It's trivial, really, coming back home exhausted, surveying the detritus, and deciding you can't deal with this right now. You'll handle it over the weekend. And then the weekend arrives, and the little free time and energy you have left feels like it should be spent on something that doesn't make you want to cry. So the can stays. The box stays. A second can joins the first. Some takeaway containers. An Amazon package you opened but never broke down. Each individual item is nothing. The aggregate is a lifestyle.
The insidious thing is how gradual it is. Nobody wakes up one morning in a scene from Hoarders. You just wake up one morning and realize there's barely any room for the mouse on your desk anymore, and you're not sure when that happened. Could have been Tuesday. Could have been November. Time does strange things when you're depressed, mostly by not doing anything at all. Days just sort of laminate onto each other.
For a long time, my life resembled that Homer Simpson meme: the one where he's looking hella fit from the front, all the ugly fat and cellulite cinched up by a belt, just out of sight. Dress well, groom yourself, and you can make a remarkable number of people think you've got your life together. I've been running this play for a while and the success rate is surprising. Surprisingly good. The bar for "having your shit together" in your late twenties or early thirties is apparently: shower and shave regularly, own clothes that fit, show up to things on time. Nobody asks follow-up questions. Few request a home inspection.
In my defense, my flatmate is a younger gentleman who leaves half-empty packets of sertraline and boxes of Wegovy pens lying about everywhere. The parallels to an essay I wrote were lost on me until much later. We are two rather depressed motherfuckers trying to keep it together, or at least not scare the ladies away. He only cleans when his girlfriend is coming over. (I have no idea how he bagged her, but I'm impressed. She's the landlord's daughter. And a hottie. I hope he gets a discount on rent.)
I must confess that I, too, only really clean when I have women over. I can imagine an evolutionary psychology paper on this. Something about mate-attracting displays and habitat maintenance. The male bowerbird builds an elaborate construct decorated with colorful objects to attract a female, and I, a higher primate with an even higher education, do essentially the same thing. My version involves frantically shoving pizza boxes into bin bags at 6pm while texting "running a bit late, see you at 8."
Unfortunately, for the past year and change, the women in question have lived elsewhere, and I usually meet them halfway or stay at theirs. This has predictable consequences for the state of my flat. The slightly less predictable consequence is them assuming I'm seeing other people when I decline to have them over. There's a real irony in being suspected of infidelity because your bedroom violates the European Convention on Human Rights.
My flatmate and I get along: we barely talk except to split the bills, and we make few demands of each other. Just two dudes being dudes. I let him colonize the supermajority of the living space with retro consoles and an ungodly heap of clothes on the couch. I don't even mind too much, at least not for my own sake. My bedroom might not be palatial, but the very few things I care about fit inside it.
I am somewhat miffed that he let the kitchen sink pile up with an unholy mound of unwashed dishes, and that he didn't have the courtesy to bag his trash when I asked him to. I'd have taken it out myself. But I've dealt with the worst of it now, in part as repayment for my own slipped promises. Glass houses, stones, etc.
Something that both did and didn't surprise me: it was less arduous than I thought. And that's depression in a nutshell, isn't it? The disorder that makes everything look impossible, including the things that take twenty minutes. Add in ADHD to taste, if you like your food cooked half-raw. Borrowing some terminology from behavioral psychology, call it a task initiation deficit. The clinical way of saying the starter motor won't start, but the engine can spin fine. Once I actually started filling bin bags, the momentum carried itself. The flat isn't spotless. But it's livable. It looks like a place where a person lives, rather than a place where a person is slowly losing a war of attrition against entropy.
Why did I finally do it? In part because I'm less depressed. Partly because someone's coming over.
Mostly the second thing.
But I did it anyway.
Is it a sign of the polar opposite of depression if I'm starting to fixate on every spec of lint or dust or schmutz in my house and car? I'll vacuum and sweep and it'll look nice, for an hour. Then I'll spot a new bit of fuzz or whatever on something and get the urge to clean it again and have to convince myself to leave it alone for a few days.
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Your description of "depressive debt is compelling enough that now I'm wondering if my self-image as something of a clutterbug is actually a cover! I'd like to think not, but depression has historically been a pervasive emotion for me ever since I was a teenager, and despite a major perspective shift that started in mid-life, it's only been the last year or so in which I can definitively say that my day-to-day mood has generally improved. Stupid alexithymia!
And wouldn't you know it, my mouse pad is in fact currently encroached upon by several pieces of mail that really just need to be filed/thrown away. And I just cleaned my new apartment up a bit because the landlord came by this morning to fix something, which is to say you've definitely given me a lot of food for thought. Thanks for this!
You're welcome! Keep in mind tidiness definitely exists on a spectrum, and there are plenty of slobs/untidy people without mood disorders. God knows I'm not the neatest even when euthymic.
But it helps to have some scaffolding, a reason to clean. I can bring myself to do it then, whereas if it was purely for my sake, it needs to get pretty bad before I can be bothered to do something.
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