My December to Remember 2: Day Nineteen
News: Twitter Files round seven reveals FBI’s coordinated efforts in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, despite it being in their possession for nearly a year before the story broke.
Jan 6th Committee, in largely symbolic gesture, recommends four criminal charges against President Trump for the 45 minute cringe riot nearly two years ago.
Supreme Court orders Title 42 to stay in place after states file order, KJP says the lifting of Title 42 does not mean the border is open, says it’s “wrong” to think otherwise.
There’s never been anything remotely resembling “clean” in my lifetime. I’ve always been surrounded by a little bit of clutter. I have organization skills for sure; I get that from my dad. But I would never describe anything about my life as “clean.” Right now I’m looking around my apartment. There’s a huge stack of laundry on my desk chair. The couch is covered in cat hair. I’ve got Christmas presents intermingled with stray clothes on my desk. The bed isn’t made. The carpet could use a vacuum. There’s about five pairs of shoes just piled alongside my purse and all the items I took home to Jersey. My bathroom scale is just sitting in the middle of the foyer. A duster sits on my bedside table. And I won’t even mention how my kitchen looks like a bomb hit it. Okay, well I guess I just did.
Either way, I’m not sitting in filth, but this is not how I want my home to look. There’ll be times I do a diligent cleaning I can be proud of, but the clutter still finds me. Then I wonder about how other people live. Do I know any meticulously clean people? Do they have piles of clothes everywhere? What stops them from putting things away if they do? What is it that’s stopping me?
The sooner I get used to the idea of cleaning house, perhaps the rest of the world will follow.
When I was a kid, I had a walk-in closet in my room. Except no one could walk into it. It was filled to the absolute brim with my stuff. I just remember a lot of chaos in that closet, as my friends and cousins would always make fun of me for how much of a disaster it was. At least once a year, my mother would come into my room and declare it’s time to clean that closet. She and I would work for days pulling everything out and attempting to organize it. It’d take a week but eventually we’d “get down to the nitty gritty” as she’d say, and I’d finally start to see and feel the effects of what it was like to have a clean room. My grade-school self being able to stand in my closet again was a great feeling, and I always vowed to keep it this way.
That never happened. Eventually I had to clean out the entire closet anyway, as we walled it off and created a closet in my parents’ master bedroom instead. The rooms were connected via the closet over the second floor stairs, so it was a pretty seamless transition. But all became walled-off before I could get to the crux of my problem. What made me so messy, and why did it never occur to me to organize anything? The third bedroom in my parents’ house is completely stuffed to the gills with stuff, things I wouldn’t even begin to know how to get rid of. What’s it going to take for me to desire a clean life?
I still have the problem in my thinking where I “as soon as” things. “As soon as” I clean my apartment, everything else will fall into place. “As soon as” I finish my 50,000 words (at 40,000 now), all my dreams will come true. But it’s much more a gradual process than that. Yes, I can clean things up, but I can’t expect miracles to occur the moment I’m done. The piecemeal strategy of getting my shit together means a lot more also shifting in the background. Things I can’t see happen, but know that they will. Because as I keep heading towards a life I’m meant to have, the more I can pick up all the pieces along the way.
The more these crazy news stories come out where those far-back closet skeletons finally see the light of day, the more I can rest easy in my vindication that I’m not as crazy as some think. They’ve been cluttering our worldview for years to hide all the purposeful bad shit they do, and come the new year, they won’t get away with it anymore. I’ll make sure of that. I’m heading into 2023 with a clean slate, completely unattached, and free within my own soul. No government can take that way from me, no matter how hard they try. The only one stopping me is me, and I’ll only do harm the more blighted I make my world.
It’s been difficult to do much else this month other than write and work. While I’m glad to be past my writer’s block on my first draft, I know there’s a lot more work to be done to make my home, and life, as hospitable as possible. My father always says “cluttered space, cluttered soul.” My soul is in a good place, but it could stand to be a little neater, too.
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