Hey also ND people and spoonies should check out @unfuckyourhabitat because they have tons of really excellent tips for cleaning when you’re not in a great mental or physical place for cleaning.
But then there’s this: I used to have to worst freaking time cleaning up living spaces, like my room or my desk, because I’d find cool things to hyperfixate on and Oh But I Just Want To Read This One Note From High School Oh Wait Look There Are Twenty More What Do You Mean It’s Four AM?
Now I clean with a bag of holding.
There is a cool thing that isn’t trash that I want to save but I don’t know where to put it and I might have to really look at it before I figure that out? INTO THE BAG, YOU.
And I should point out that I am a grade-A certified 100% coping with actual OCD hoarder. I am a magpie. Everything is shiny and I must have it in my nest. If you take it from me I will be devastated. Throwing things away is NO.
There’s obvious trash that I can let go of really easily. Tissues and empty drink cups and the plastic seals from food. This is thrash, this goes in the trash. But what about this broken guitar pick? I broke that on the first song I learned all the way through, that can’t go in the trash! What about this pile of wristbands from concerts? What about these old movie tickets? No, these are precious memories, along with the ugly stuffed animal that I hate that my friend gave me as a joke or the sequined scarf from my mom that I will never ever ever wear. If you take them away from me I might forget and if I forget and I don’t have proof that it happened maybe it didn’t and maybe nothing I remember is real and I’m lying to myself and I should just believe that nothing is wrong and go about my day and never get over those old traumas that probably never happened anyway, right?
Woah now, that’s a hell of a spiral. Stop it by putting things in your bag of holding.
The bag of holding is NOT trash. The bag of holding is a place to temporarily put your shiny things so they don’t get lost while you make your bed and check for moldy dishes on your desk. Once you have cleared the room of all hazards or potentially toxic plates you can sit with your bag. And then you can hyperfixate and the joy begins.
You can SORT your shiny things! Sorting is delightful! These are cloth things and these are paper things and these are friend things and these are family things. Yes. Yes, excellent categories.
My favorite thing to do after cleaning is to sit down with my bag of holding and stick things into memory books. This isn’t anything as tidy or crafty as scrapbooking, this is finding those oldschool photo albums with the sticky pages and cramming them full of con badges and photos and wristbands and broken guitar picks. This isn’t making order from chaos, this is putting chaos into a small space where it sheds less. I have three of these books, one is totally full and one is mostly full and one is waiting for the two bags of stuff that I’ve set aside so I can spend a weekend sticking things in books. The books are huge and inconvenient, the full one probably weighs ten pounds. But three huge inconvenient books are better than stepping on that pick again and again.
My books-of-crap are probably the single most effective behavior modifier I’ve ever found for my hoarding. I don’t really have a hoard anymore. I have messes, yeah, and they have to be cleaned up, but my hoard has gotten limited to little bags of holding where I put things that will end up in my books. It’s manageable.
Which gets me back to where I originally wanted to be when I started to respond to this post - manageability is key.
Junebugging is a great technique to make things manageable for day-to-day tidying up and creating a livable space. What if your space is already totally unlivable? What if you’ve slept on a couch for months because the bed is covered in books and dirty clothes and a computer monitor for some reason?
I cleaned up my hoard using a cleaning technique called 40 bags in 40 days. It was pretty bad. I ended up throwing away my own bodyweight in magazines and newspapers. I found dead lizards under piles of stuff. I spent a lot of time really hating myself for how disgusting the mound was and how awful it had become.
The goal is to divide your space into 40 areas to clean and then to generate 40 bags of stuff to either donate or throw away. You have to decide on your 40 areas ahead of time and you have to write those areas down on a checklist so that you don’t end up getting bogged down by scope-creep. Cleaning your bathroom counter doesn’t mean cleaning the toilet. Cleaning under your bed doesn’t mean making the bed, not when you’re dealing with a life-ruining kind of a hoard.
The first day I started with the door of the room. It had been my bedroom in high school and I decorated it with pictures and posters and newspaper clippings and decapitated barbies. I spent four hours cleaning that door. JUST the door.
Next was the space at the foot of my bed, which was the part of my room closest to the door. Three hours on just those six square feet. Give yourself time to wander away, to go into the rest of the house. But you don’t go further into the room. You are cleaning JUST THIS right now. You can go get a drink, you can have a nice chat with your sister, you can make a sandwich, write an email, but then you are coming back to ONLY this part of the room.
This is cleaning in a marathon, a sustained action that is difficult to maintain with ADHD and something that your hoarding is going to resist the hell out of. And that’s why you focus on small areas. Don’t get overwhelmed looking at the rest of the room and the mess in there, don’t get overwhelmed thinking about the rest of the house. Right now you are cleaning the top of the nightstand, you’ll be back for the drawers of the nightstand tomorrow and the rest of the room doesn’t exist.
When you’re cleaning like this you’ve gotta have five boxes or bags following you. One for trash, one for stuff you’re going to keep, one for donations, one for stuff you’re not sure you’re going to keep or not, and a bag of holding.
Your goal is to sort stuff for five to ten minutes at a time then take a breather. Play music in the background - work for the length of about two songs then break for one. This isn’t going to be fast, you’re not in a race. Just get the stuff into its various bags or boxes. When the area is clear take a break then use a few minutes on sanitizing the area. Sweep or dust or wipe down with bleach if applicable. Strip the sheets if it’s the bed that you’ve just cleared.
Then consider your bags/boxes. Now is the time to sort the “not sure if keeping” container. Take the trash to the trash, put the donation bag with other donation bags. Your “keep” bag gets put with other “keep” stuff somewhere that is not the area you’re cleaning. And then you’re done for the day.
If you’ve got some good focus going on and can move to another area and want to maintain momentum, do that. But don’t do more than three areas in a day.
Your goal at the end is basically an empty room. If you can’t take “keep” stuff out of the space then limit it to one corner. Once your space is clear you can put things where they belong but you don’t want stuff getting in your way as you move on to other areas of the room.
Focusing on one small area at a time and giving yourself lots of little breaks makes it hard to forget what you’re doing. You are *not* putting the dirty dishes you found in the dishwasher, you are just getting them out of the place you found them. You are *not* reshelving books, just deciding whether or not you’re going to keep them. When you are done with that area you can start the laundry you found there or run the dishwasher or alphabetize by author or forget all of it and veg out on video games for a while. But while you are cleaning and clearing that small area that you have written down ahead of time and scheduled to clean today you are ONLY getting that area clear of crap. Multitasking is for NTs and you don’t have time for that bullshit, you are making a clean patch on the floor come hell or high water and no clothes-folding is going to get in your way.
But what do you do with the stuff? What happens to the stuffed animal you hate or the scarf from your mom?
That depends on what the stuff is and how well medicated I am, honestly. On good days I know that someone else will enjoy this awful scarf and I don’t need physical tokens as proof that my mom loves me. On good days that stuffed animal or ugly scarf goes into the donation bag without a second thought.
On less good days I’m wasteful. I’m not able to let it go but I hate having it. So I take a piece. Cut the ear off a stuffed animal or a tassel of the scarf and put it in my bag of holding. It will go in the memory book and I’ll have a little bit of it. I don’t need the whole thing, just enough to know it was real. I feel bad donating something I’ve broken, so if it’s noticeable (like the cut-off ear) it might get put in the trash; a scarf missing a tassel will likely still be donated.
On bad days I can’t let it go so I hide it. I put it in a bag or a bin to percolate on and think about and keep out of sight. It lives in my space but isn’t allowed to clutter my field of view - the scarf isn’t in my closet, the stuffed animal isn’t on top of my dresser. It gets put away and I wait for a time when I’m well enough to let it go.
Sometimes you can’t let things go. Sometimes things have a hold on you and you need to recognize that. Don’t beat yourself up or hate yourself if you need to keep some things for a while, but recognize that it’s temporary. It’s just a thing. You can have it for now but someday you won’t need it. You’re still doing a good job and should be proud of yourself.
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