Cinderelly, Cinderelly
My free time feels completely consumed nowadays. Everything has to be clean all the time now.
I discussed this in a previous newsletter, linked here, but I now feel as if, perhaps, I understand the compulsion better.
I thought perhaps this was the weight of domesticity consuming me, like it does to so many women. And I think to an extent that’s true. There is a pressure, more now so than ever I feel, for women to be clean and well-kept. All you have to do is go to TikTok (which I am now off of, thank god), where you can watch someone walk you through what a “Sunday reset” looks like, or their routine for a casual clean of their entire apartment. It’s soothing to watch someone organize their fridge or wipe down every surface in their home, rinse out the sink until it sparkles. But, for me at least, I feel like it creates an inner expectation, especially in women. It’s primarily women creating content of the pristine, so much so that it feels like a new form of beauty, a new component you have to check off to be desirable, or even perhaps just “evolved” or “healthy.” And while it is desirable in men, the concept of cleanliness as being “healthy” becoming more infectious (have you been reading all the therapy speak discussion?), it still isn’t a necessity.
But I think it comes from other places too.
I think of my mother, of her obsessive tidying and cleaning. I think of her yelling in disgust, and I burrowed under a nest of clothes on the bed to go to sleep, because yes I was messy, but I wasn’t going to put them on the floor. I realize, recently, how important her home was to her, because of how important my home is to me. It’s the only place I feel relaxed, safe even. It’s a compulsion to protect in a strange sense, a compulsion to protect my peace. Somehow, “peace” has come to mean “clean.”
My friend Ramsay says, “I’m trying to remind myself that cleanliness is not a moral good.” Cleanliness is not a moral good. I know she’s right. But I think, to me, my domestic life, space, the maintenance and cleanliness of it, often feels like the only thing I can control.
Much of my adult life, I have felt out of control. Life simultaneously feels like something that is happening to me, unable to be directed, but also like I am the one propelling it forward with no direction. I am spinning the wheel over and over with an inability to stop, my self careening out of control in all directions. People confirm this for me often. Sometimes it’s said with a sweetness, affectionate descriptions of me as “chaotic”, the one who always has a wild story, the one who’s lively and unpredictable. Other times it’s harsher, an indictment of my recklessness, carelessness. I’m difficult to be around for extended periods of time. I am only a fun friend to have for a few months, until I become too unpredictable to deal with.
It’s strange for me to say, with such a calm life in comparison to past periods, a stable job and nights spent in bed with sudoku puzzles and Top Chef instead of nights spent out late knocking back whiskey with Budweiser to chase it, that my life feels like it is out of control. Not necessarily careening out of control. Just out of my own control. Unable to be directed into what it is that I want. I think of the Mary Miller quote from a story in ALWAYS HAPPY HOUR that goes something like, “I don’t consider the actuality of my situation, which is that every day I live this life it becomes more and more mine, the real one, and the one I’m supposed to be living falls further away; eventually it will be gone forever.”
Maybe this life isn’t mine. But my home is.
I feel often nowadays that I have been using housework to avoid doing the real work of writing. How wild is that, that I would rather be doing the dishes than sitting with the blank page? What does that mean for me as a writer? I try to sit down and I can’t focus because I’m thinking about the objects out of place, how nothing feels organized and probably never will. And I get back up and streak through the house tidying again.
The funniest part about all of this is that I’m not even particularly clean. The floor is disgusting. For a while I was good at the occasional mop of the entire house, but I’ve since given up. I still don’t know exactly the best way to clean the shower, though I keep looking it up in an attempt to memorize it. I can’t move my bed without scratching the floor, and I can’t vacuum underneath the whole thing properly, so I just try not to think about it. I’ve never liked to dust. How funny is it, all this obsessing over something I’m not even doing particularly well.
Perhaps cleanliness is not a moral good. But mess often feels like a manifestation of my own shortcomings. I still am not the cleanest person in the world, but I am much cleaner, because when life feels out of control, when I feel out of control, here is something tangible with marked results that I can fix. It’s become an anchor: something that tethers, but also something that has begun to weigh me down.