Picture this, you walk into a room full of clutter. There are things everywhere, old food lying around and very little space to move around. This is my worst nightmare. I'm incredibly obsessed with cleanliness, and it irks me to my core when my area isn't in tip-top shape.
When I was younger, my mother brought up my siblings and I with the rules of cleaning. Our beds had to be made every morning before we could do anything else that day. This, of course, means that we're all incredibly clean people, right? Debatable. As much as I dearly love my siblings, they're not on my level of cleaning - and that's totally OK!
For some reason I went to the extreme side of things and I always needed to have my area immaculate. From a young age, I viewed cleaning as a calming experience. I have a very distinct memory from middle school, in sixth grade, of coming home from a long and bully-filled day. I was upset and didn't know what to do, so I decided to reorganize my entire room. I might have even changed up the layout of the room while I was at it. I took everything out from under my bed and went through what I needed and what I could get rid of. I moved boxes here, folders there, some more trinkets here and lots of things thrown out there. It must've taken me three hours, and by the end I was completely calm again. Cleaning cleared my mind and let me escape from my problems that day.
Some people think that I'm crazy, they think it doesn't make any sense that my stress relief is cleaning, but to each their own. I've gone over to friends' and boyfriends' houses and cleaned for them. I've cleaned up the places that I've worked at. There's just something about taking a place from it's start to a completely organized and different place when you've finished. It's a sense of pure joy when you can take something and update it just a bit to enhance the area or the object itself. There's just something about cleaning and being invested in one area for hours to see that payoff at the end.
I've always wished that I could spend hundreds of dollars on beautiful and pristine organizing boxes to fit all of my little knick-knacks and things that I probably won't even need for the next 10 years of my life. But hey, that's what the boxes are made for!
Every time I start to get remotely stressed I take a step back and honestly think about what I can clean next. It brings me to my happy place, and I can still be quite productive while removing the stress. Without extensive cleaning I wouldn't have a healthy way to deal with stress. If you're trying to find your "fix," maybe next time you're feeling swamped pick a room or a drawer and take everything out and organize that sucker.
