I had never considered myself to be a particularly messy person, nor had I considered myself excessively organized. I just thought of myself as a normal person, in terms of cleanliness. I had my level of what I considered 'clean,' and since no one complained about my room being messy or cluttered, I assumed I was doing fine. That all changed once I got to college.
Sharing a room and bathroom with two other girls is hard enough, but factor in our exponentially different personalities, and it's a recipe for chaos. Don't get me wrong, I love my roommates. They're beautiful and amazing women, and this semester is pretty much an unending sleepover with my best friends. That being said, I am a lot more organized than my roommates, to the point where my friends have suspected I live with OCD.
My side of the closet is organized first by style (outerwear, to dresses, to tops), and then by color. My dresser drawers are set up the same way. The top shelf has shirts, folded by color; the middle drawer has bottoms, folded by style; the bottom drawer is split between pajamas and workout clothes. I have a shoe hanger storing all of my shoes.
Their closets and dressers are not like mine. At all. There is no method to the order in which things are hung up in their closets, and their shelves are filled with piles of items shoved together and stacked haphazardly upon one another. Their shoes are stored on the closet floor in mismatched piles.
My desk is free of clutter. Their desks are full of papers, projects, sorority paraphernalia, and snacks, so much that if you managed to find a spot to put something down, you would probably lose it before you even let it go. They do their homework at their desks each night, but I have yet to figure out how the can function with so much stuff surrounding them.
Clothing trails from the closet to their beds. Now, I'm not saying that I am perfectly organized and don't toss my clothes to the floor after a long day/late night. But I hate to go longer than 24 hours without moving my dirty clothes from the foot of my bed to my laundry basket. They can last days without picking up their clothes.
So, what is it like to be the 'neat-freak' roomie? It means hearing the phrase "Wow, you're... really organized," and "Are you sure you don't have OCD," more times than I can count. It means tripping over other peoples' shoes and books and bags at 7 a.m., when I don't have my glasses on. It means other people always asking me where something is. It means taking out the trash and detailing out the bathroom every week because I can't let a week go by without cleaning it.
In all honesty, I enjoy living with my roommates. They're different from me and it's good to learn to live with other people. And they aren't dirty at all, just messy. It doesn't upset me that they're not as organized as I am. If their habits infringed on my personal space, it would drive me mad, but they are very conscientious about containing their clutter.
