This is Going to Sound Entitled and Elitist, But…….

Where can you reduce clutter in your life?

I need a housekeeper.

I do not know how I could acquire one, because the going rates around here are quite expensive. That being said, there’s a method to my madness, though. Both people who are neurodivergent and/or suffer from mental illness have problems taking care of themselves regarding clutter and cleanliness. The things that neurotypical people find easy, like creating a routine for putting things away are anathema to the neurodivergent. That’s because we can create a system. We no not maintain them well, if at all. For instance, the perfect system for someone who’s ADHD or AuDHD means everything is right out in front of you, all the time……. because I’m suggesting object permanence is a problem………………..

No, seriously. I’ve read a ton of books on how to manage myself (they haven’t helped, but I’m trying). One of them is The Bible and it’s called “How to Keep House While Drowning.” That’s because it doesn’t offer you practical advice on cleaning like Kim and Aggie from “How Clean is Your House” (one of my favorite BBC shows, now archived on YouTube). No, it is a straight up workbook over why your emotions are getting the better of you when it comes to cleaning. Because first, it’s either demand avoidance or burnout. Then, it’s shame, guilt, and anxiety over the way you let your house get when you were literally incapable due to a straight up disability. Basically, “How to Keep House While Drowning” is a way to organize your life so that you don’t think the world is coming down around you every time you don’t organize something.

The second book is much more practical because women have different needs with ADHD than men. It’s called “The Queen of Distraction: How Women with ADHD Can Conquer Chaos, Find Focus, and Get Things Done.” It’s here where I learned that if you’re ADHD, get clear cabinets. Don’t give a damn about what other people think. If you can’t see your stuff, you won’t organize it. It will stay hidden from your mind forever…………….

Because I’m suggesting that object permanence is a problem………… The funniest thing is that the joke about object permanence was actually about me, not clutter. That Zac thinks of me living as much further away than I do. I should have told him to get me a clear cabinet……… For Houstonians, it’s about the distance from Lindsay’s house on the east side to my old house in Westbury. For Portlanders, it’s about the same distance as it is from Trendy Third St. SW to 181st and SE Stark.

This means that it takes 33 minutes at 0500 if you’re driving, but if we were both caught in morning or afternoon drive, I could probably beat him home on the Metro/bus. That’s the thing I love about the train/bus. Unless it’s snowing, the busses are reliable and I can pre-guess about what time I’m going to get somewhere. No freeway in DC can tell you that, and take that check to the bank and cash it… The longest I’ve ever been delayed on the Metro is 10 or 15 minutes, and that’s just because we were slow getting into the station by about five minutes at least twice because there was another red line train on our track. I wish I’d taken the first one….. obviously.

Until you read both books, you will literally not know how to handle your life, and of course there are a million books written on ADHD, but “Queen” is endorsed by the author(s) that wrote “Driven to Distraction,” the therapist and psychiatrist Bible on ADHD presentation. But what those authors were saying is that “Queen” does a better job of catering specifically to female ADHD. There’s just so much bullshit around female ADHD, because first of all, I believe that there are a lot more of us with hyperactivity that could use stimming to an enormous degree……. but it was beaten out of us by the expectations of the older women in our lives. Social masking has so much to do with how you’re raised. You learn that your natural behavior is unacceptable, and you do things that make you think you fit in, because you are only imitating their behavior, not understanding why things are done the way they’re done.

The first sign of ADHD in all people is making a diagnosis appointment and being late for it. Those things are universal. I believe that stimming, anger, etc. isn’t beaten out of boys because men are socialized to be angry, anyway, and because most women were enculturated by their mothers, they will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make their neurodivergent child into some version of them, because that’s how they were taught to behave. And perhaps it’s more than that…… because neurodivergence and mental illness are genetic, your mother might actually be neurodivergent and is trying to teach you her own coping mechanisms for feeling like an alien.

Read “How to Keep House While Drowning,” because until you work through your emotional issues with keeping tidy, then you’ll be ready for the content that “Queen” offers, because her system for organization actually works. I can’t remember if the author is ADHD or whether her organization skills came from designing systems for her ADHD children, but please hear me that the emotional work first is the best thing you can do for yourself, because it will put into perspective why you are not a bad person because you can’t do these things.

As we used to say in our church creed at Bridgeport, “be responsible and let go of guilt. Be mindful and carry no shame.” You will not be ready to address practical things until both of those ideas happen for you. Neurodivergent people will not make the commitment to organize until they don’t feel like shit about themselves 100% of the time.

It’s one of the reasons I hate “Hoarders,” to be honest. You get the neurodivergent/mentally ill wails of people who are nowhere near prepared to get rid of their stuff and are supposed to be grateful for the favor. I am sure that they will be after some therapy, but it would be like taking a baby bird out of a nest and saying, “fly, bitch! Fly!” There is no way that a television show can cover what needs to happen so that hoarding doesn’t recur. It takes years to get rid of those tendencies, and a television show coming in to clean your house once is not the answer. It will look the same way in a year. Also, I have seen a lot of autistic people (in retrospect) that have gone into complete meltdown and burnout…………… and it makes for good television. It’s one thing to code a fictional character as autistic. It is embarrassing as FUCK for people to film you and show your real unregulated emotions come out. All the social masking stops because they’re terrified. And to the producers, that’s entertainment. On this one issue, fuck them.

I can always find the silver lining, and that’s learning how professional organizers do what they do. I think I would be a much better housekeeper than I would at keeping my own systems going, because most neurodivergent people can clean someone else’s house, even if it’s a straight up hoarding nightmare, because they don’t have any emotional investment in the mess and how it got that bad. Perception is everything. “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” I will completely dissociate because I can.

Maybe we should offer an exchange or something. I am absolutely OCD about my own kitchen, the one thing I keep so clean you could eat off the floor that’s completely of my own volition because of “how I was raised.” (Shoutout to all of them….. Dana, my first chef, John Kinkaid, John Fot, Drew Collard, Damon Hersch, Anh Lu, Evan Henson, Ryan Victor (shoutout to the mixologist) and the thousands of hours I’ve spent on YouTube with top-tier chefs learning knife skills. I watch Bourdain and Ripert. It takes me about 30 seconds to go into the ugly cry).

But the kitchen is ironclad in my mind because I spent so many years doing it. It’s the one room of the house where I don’t attach any emotion to how messy it gets because it’s not all on me. I will do everyone’s dishes if they’re in the sink because I can’t stand soaking a pot (we’ve covered this before. It doesn’t work). Plus, I have the right and experience to say that I’m just going to be better at it than they are because one of my housemates is a cook, but she works in a hospital, so it’s not really the same thing as trying to close down a kitchen as fast as humanly possible. The only thing I can’t seem to get out is the discoloration on the glass-top stove, but I’m sure John Fot will write me a dissertation on it when he reads this, and it will be delightful because there’s nothing more that I love than reading about kitchen hacks.

Where I struggle is in the private places, because I don’t have a system for anything. I am a Virgo, so I am killer at creating systems that would work for neurotypical people because I’ve watched what works for them for many years. I even picked up a few things from Meagan in senior English that helped me. She color coded her subjects like Trivial Pursuit, something I do to this day by changing the folder colors in my file tree. What I cannot do is extrapolate all of that into having a life in which I can thrive on structure because that’s all my autism wants…….. and my ADHD nopes out quickly.

This has become a problem with every relationship I’ve ever had, because I didn’t have the words for “autistic meltdown and burnout.” I didn’t have words for things like “pathological demand avoidance” (I don’t know if mine is pathological yet, I just haven’t had treatment. Basically, you get said treatment and if it doesn’t work, it’s pathological.). I don’t know how much of my health insurance will cover an autism diagnosis, but I know that I need one, badly. I am at odds with myself over the two processing disorders all the time. I’m ready to go through the official process because not being diagnosed is causing more problems than it’s worth. I need to know as much about AuDHD as humanly possible if Zac and I start getting closer, or I meet someone else and actually want to pursue living with them.

But what I do know is that the reason my relationships tend not to be successful is that most people on the spectrum are not caught. They’re pegged as “weaponizing incompetence” or what’s called “learned helplessness.” Most people attribute too much malice into our behavior, when we literally don’t think the same way as you. But all of this “weaponized incompetence” would go away if I had a housekeeper, because I wouldn’t be creating resentment in my relationship over the house being so…………… meeeeeeee.

One of the reasons that I was really looking forward to living overseas with Daniel (we’d talked about Viet Nam) is that hiring servants is completely normal and adds to the local economy. If our house was big enough, they could live with us. That would be ideal, because I’d love a housekeeper to flip me shit when I don’t put things back where they go and lose them a minute later. My mind doesn’t record where everything goes, only a few….. and even that is sketchy.

I don’t know that even on a combined salary we could afford such a thing, unless we hired an au pair and said, “we actually don’t have any kids except a 25-year-old. Basically we’re the kids.” We might not get any bites, but it’s worth a shot. 😛

Most emotionally unavailable people start shutting down when they feel resentment, because they won’t just say it out loud. They don’t have any practice……. especially in lesbian relationships. I can hear resentment because I’ve heard it before. What no one has ever said to me is “clearly you need help, and I’m going to help you.” This doesn’t mean anything in terms of cleaning up one mess. I will never forget both Dana and Carol’s work on my past places to get them ready to turn over. They were beasts, and I can’t thank them enough- even more in retrospect.

When Dana came over to help me, we’d just begun that transition from friends who hung out occasionally to “you’re my new best friend. Call me every day.” A girlfriend that I’d loved so hard I broke my own heart due to terrible expectations left me in a wreck. it was only supposed to be a May-December romance, and I was foolish enough to think that we clicked, anyway. Disaster ensued. She was much older than me, but in a lot of ways, I was older than her because all INFJs are a thousand years old when they’re born. I think that’s why I seek out women who are age-gapped from me. I’ve been that old since I was nine.

Anyway, it was the hardest breakup I’ve ever had (so far), because I lost it. I was grieving the future that I wanted with her, and then I went to a party. At that party, I met a couple who had the same age difference as my girlfriend and me, and they were announcing they were having a baby. I did not know this beforehand, and I was so caught off guard that everyone thought I was crying over the good news of people I’d just met and it was a little bit over the top.

If you knew her like I did, you would have been wrecked, too.

My reaction was to go into total burnout. I didn’t leave my bed unless I had to for months. I barely made it to church, but that was the one social obligation I could keep despite it being murder seeing her all the time. We eventually made our peace, and I still think she’s cute as a button. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t hell on earth, then.

I lived in what I told Dana was “dumped girl phase,” and that I’d never told anyone this before, but I cannot function. The most beautiful words in the English language came out of her mouth…….. “we’ll fix it.” It wasn’t that she was going to fix everything for me. She didn’t say, “I’ll fix it.” She whipped me into shape so that I became anal Annie about my whole apartment just to say thank you and it will never get this bad again. It would have been nothing if I hadn’t changed my behavior as a result of my deep gratitude.

But that apartment was basically a studio, with a folding door between my bedroom and the living room. I gave away a lot of stuff, and then I didn’t have much to keep clean. I didn’t need a housekeeper because as long as I didn’t buy anything new (not that I don’t like nice things….. I don’t like to manage them), then my apartment would stay clean.

The second time that Carol and Dana helped me was when I’d just broken up with Katharin. I went into meltdown and burnout because I didn’t know what to do. We’d rented this house that was only doable on two incomes, and it was just the right house for a couple……… just not for us, as it turns out. So, I was happy about the breakup because I knew that Katharin didn’t really want to move to Portland. She just said she did because I wanted to go, because I knew that Houston was a minefield of triggers and at that time, Portland wasn’t.

She can blame our breakup on me all she wants to, but the truth is she couldn’t just say “I let you go find the house and I went home to Corpus to spend the summer and I realized I couldn’t leave my family.” She had backed out of moving twice before she finally said she wasn’t coming because I “cheated on her.” What really happened is that Dana read me the riot act and I have never taken in a conversation so hard.

Here is some version of what she said, most of it verbatim but I don’t remember everything………

It’s not normal for your girlfriend to go through your checking transactions to see if you’ve been in your best friend’s neighborhood when you have a thousand friends in Southeast. It’s not normal for someone to shoot down an incredible opportunity for you because you’re going to be gone for three months. She turned it into “if you really loved me, you’d stay.” It’s not normal for someone to fall in love with you and then say, “I’d think you were less flaky if you finished your degree. It’s not normal for your girlfriend to keep you away from a best friend you met years and years before you met her. I’m tired of watching you hurt.

Editor’s Note:

I’d been offered an internship at Human Rights Campaign to help shape Sunday School curriculum in modern/liberal interpretations to include queer people. It would be for people like the More Light Presbyterians, the Lutherans (I could have written for Nadia Bolz-Weber and don’t think I’m not mad about it), and the Reconciling Movement in the United Methodist Church…………….. the closest I’ll ever become to being a Methodist minister because they made it clear they didn’t want me when I was 15.

So, that little speech made me realize that my best friend had my best interests at heart, and Katharin had stopped drinking, but was still a dry drunk with the need to control me. Her family also gave her the most fucked up childhood you can imagine, so both of our trauma reflexes were well=ingrained.

Katharin’s family wasn’t wealthy, so when she turned 18, they took out a whole bunch of credit cards and loans in her name. Then, she came out to them and pretended she was dead for a year, saying that they didn’t have to pay her back because it was “the gay tax.”

In retrospect, at that time in my life, Katharin was way above my pay grade, and no one noticed because she was “more successful than me.” She was a middle school counselor, and good at her job. But when her frustrations boiled over, it was “All Pick on Leslie Day.”

The relief of that relationship ending, yet the terror, made it where I just collected shit everywhere. Just soda bottles everywhere I didn’t pick up because I didn’t care. I couldn’t.

Autistic meltdown and burnout makes for good television, tho……….. eyeroll.

So, in order to get me out of the house, Carol and Dana came over and we did it all in one day, maybe one and a half. I don’t remember what happened next; I might have moved in with them, or I might have stayed at another friend’s house. But what I know is that everyone who met Katharin in Oregon didn’t like her….. for me or just in general. That’s because no one in Portland is impressed by what you do.

And sometimes, Katharin was just as straight up mean in person, in front of my friends, that she was at home. It just goes to show how easily I got used to her words making me feel terrible, because my words about myself weren’t that different.

In that case, hiring a housekeeper wouldn’t have helped, because Katharin’s anger and resentment came from a completely different place. But in all the others, I have found that because people’s problems are so complex and emotional, not being able to clean up after yourself for whatever reason is the one problem you actually can throw money at, because you’re not hiring a servant. You’re making an accommodation for your disability that will take resentment about chores off the table.

But before I have the ability to hire a housekeeper, I at least need to start reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” instead of “The Joy of Leaving Your Shit All Over the Place.”