Cleaning Aids

Meant to do a different post originally, but this is what came up, for reasons you’ll read.

Yesterday, Dad and I were going to sort through some of the stuff in my room to try to get the area in front of my closet clear. (Well, he said that he’d pick the stuff up and my responsibility was to sort it into “Keep” and “Trash”.) However, my nerves were still jangled from what happened Wednesday afternoon (more later) so I asked him if we could do it today instead. He agreed.

We were originally going to do the cleaning after my psychologist appointment (she was really glad to hear about this blog)… but between the snow and bringing my cousin’s daughter from my brother’s house to theirs, and my needing to make dinner (homemade vegetable lasagne, no eggplant or zucchini, yum!), we didn’t get to it until after dinner.

It was… surprisingly easy to consign a lot – including some magazines from subscriptions I’d gotten into – to the trash (or recycling, in most cases). Dad was quite pleased at my ability to do so, and also at the fact that I’d taken the initiative to get started before he came downstairs. (That helped all the more. 😉 ) I think that also helped with my territory issues (believe me, I’m more territorial over some things than Imber is, and she gets hissy and snarly if Thor even moves outside my bedroom door, let alone pokes his head in) – both the starting everything out and the making of the decisions.

Regarding my difficulty making decisions, as per my post on “Making Decisions and Prioritization“, I think I’d already decided most of what I had to get rid of and what to keep. There is a box of things I have to review – most of which is just figuring out what folder to put things in, a bit of which is figuring out whether it goes in recycling or not – but the vast majority of decisions I’d already made, it was just a matter of putting them into practice. That also definitely helped, and made it fairly quick.

Now, we haven’t gotten to the top of my chest of drawers (though that will definitely take less time and effort), or my closet – that’s being saved for Sunday. (Well, the chest of drawers is. If I can bear going through the closet – which I may end up steeling myself for tomorrow [Saturday] – that will be included.)

Then, it becomes a matter of keeping it clean. That’s where I usually fall down, so I’m really hoping that between my psychologist, this blog, and my new awareness and coping mechanisms I’ve taken away from blogging about and reading the blogs on adults with ASD, I’ll be able to manage to control the “messiness urge”. It’s nice to be able to walk over to my closet now without having to lean over stuff, and dig through a pile of all kinds of things to get the doors open.

I’m drained, though. Some of it is because I was moving around, moving things around, and that’s exercise; some of it is because exercise produces heat, and that drains me; and I suspect some of it is the energy I needed to put my decisions into practice. But it is so worth it, to be able to be proud of myself. The last three times Dad had to clean my place (when I was living in Toronto, in my own apartments), I essentially just stood there, frozen. “Catatonic”, Dad put it – which probably makes sense, when one thinks about it deeply. This time, I participated. Dad was proud of me, and I was able to be proud of myself. Which is why this post is categorized in “Achievements”, as well as the other categories.

Expect another post tomorrow!

😉 tagAught

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