I can tell my anxiety kicks in when I do laundry 4 times a day, and have to keep cleaning. I clean because it gives me control over what’s going on in my surroundings. For the longest time, when I was in school, I let my room become a disaster each week. I’d like to let my food wrappers and my old papers pile and pile until I had to tackle a Mount Everest of bad habits every night. My clothes never occupied the closet, and resided in their own cliques. The colored jeans would gossip about the flannel shirts, and the dresses stuck to their own. Graphic tees floated between each group, to mitigate the strict social standards.
My bed was never made, meaning the stuffed animals had free reign to draw their lines in the sand and wage the wars they desired. Life was dictated by the chaos I let myself live in. I didn’t spend time in my room, because I was so busy, but even when I had the time, I chose not to. It was so mentally taxing and draining that I couldn’t look at the mess or the hands that caused it. I didn’t want to spend the few hours I had away from school and stress, desperately trying to get my life in order. I kept posters off the walls, torn down like trees from the Amazon, never to be planted. Maybe if I never settled into my new life and new room, then I could get up and move on again. I wouldn’t need to worry about goodbyes, because I would never have settled my roots.
Since quarantine started, one of the first things I did was take everything off my walls. I had tried, fruitlessly, to get my room decorated in a way that I wanted to keep up. I had 2 staples on my walls. On my closet, I have post-it notes, green, pink, and blue. The form a giant negative space heart on my closet doors and above, on the wall, it says “reinvent” in large capitals. Reinvent love- a phrase coming from my favorite artist during sophomore year. Ryan Ross, the songwriter behind most of Panic! At the Disco’s greatest albums, said that “we must reinvent love”. I thought a lot about reinventing love- at the time, I was in a relationship with someone living hours away. My first relationship was also my first serious one, and it was also long distance. I love a good challenge. To reinvent love was what I always sought to do, to change it to fit me, and whomever I fell in love with in the future. Maybe it was a sign that we should’ve broken up sooner.
The other staple is on the wall across, with my large window, is a collage. One day, when I was sad and angsty, I ripped up old fashion magazines. I torn them to shreds all for the sake of aesthetics, and taped them up. Making a massive mural of clothes and ideas. These two things won’t come off my walls, mainly because I have too big of a personal connection to them.
I knew I was changing when I hung up lights, and put up every thing I could on my walls. Streamers, balloons, curtains. I made a home when it felt as though the world didn’t care if I lived or died.
When it came out that people were upset they had to be quarantined, and were even more upset they had to wear masks, it was disheartening. Knowing that people couldn’t do the bare minimum to make your life easier. Knowing that if you got sick because of someone else’s negligence, you’d be the one to die. I made myself a home because I wanted to feel more comfortable when I knew that everyone outside wouldn’t care to do that.
Taking care of myself mentally as an adult is really hard. It is sometimes more exhausting to shut of my work brain and my working life to relax. How will I know when I’ve done enough? How will I know if I’m progressing in the way I’ve needed? How will I get there if I’m not always hustling to get it done?
I can tell it’s getting bad again in few ways. Ways that destroy me so much that I have to rely on work to feel like I’m doing anything at all.
Cutting myself off from my friends, and speaking very, very rarely.
Cleaning way too much or not at all.
Only doing one thing- writing, painting, something- but not being able to cut myself off from it.
These are kind of the warning signs that things are bad, or are going to be bad. Maybe I need to take a break, or I need to stop and recuperate. If I don’t I know it means I’ll be falling into another depressive or anxious spiral. Sometimes, due to my autoimmune disease, I have to sleep for 12-16 hours after an anxiety episode to try and do a hard reset on my physical and mental wellbeing.
Something I’m learning as I go through this is that I can’t keep expecting perfection without letting myself rest. My body and mind are very resilient, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t sensitive, and it doesn’t mean I should just keep going till I break. I always thought that getting ahead meant going till you physically can’t, and then pushing yourself anyway.
I think that sort of idea needs to be fixed. I don’t what that balance means, but I know that cleaning my room, and making it my own was the first place to start.
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