I Am a Messy Person
I admit it freely. Yes, I make a mess. I am sloppy. “A pig,” my mother calls me.
I always have been. Oink oink.
Whenever she came into my room when I was a child, my mother would make cracks about the numerous tornadoes and atomic bombs that must have occurred to have caused my room to be in such a state. She’d scowl and get angry, or shrug and laugh it off. I think, after a while, she got used to the fact that she had raised a messy, messy daughter. Still, I lock my bedroom door when she comes to visit, just to be safe.
It’s not that I dislike being clean. I just prefer the clutter. I surround myself with clean laundry that I refuse to put away, old quizzes and essays that I won’t toss in the trash. I’m a hoarder, at heart (just a controlled one). I feel at home surrounded by the proof of my life, of my living; a tidy room makes me uncomfortable.
My messy nature tends to reflect in the choices I make, too. It’s not that I’ve had a bad life— I’m a white girl from Long Island with loving parents and a good childhood to look back fondly on. It’s just that ever since I’ve been able to make my own choices, I feel like I haven’t done anything right.
I’m not doing things wrong, either. The mistakes I make are understandable, my decisions (and indecisions) are ones that quite a few people my age typically go through. I chose the wrong college, then the wrong major— now I’ve settled on not choosing anything. I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, anymore. I think I’m afraid to chose and be wrong again.
But when I have a moment of clarity, of something neat and clean and shining, I tend to want to cling to it so badly. And when I lose these things, I panic.
I stay up until five in the morning.
I create a new blog to have a space where I can talk to myself with no one listening.
I can’t breathe and my heart is aching from beating too hard and I want to give up, to go home to my mother and ask her to take me back. It wouldn’t be bad, after all, would it? I would work for my family business, in a trade that I don’t love (but I certainly do not hate either). I could live my life on Long Island. I might be content, here.
I’ve always been an excellent student. I haven’t always gotten the grades to show for it, but I’ve always had a passion and a love for learning. My papers were organized neatly into folders, then files to be stored in my desk after the semester had ended.
At some point, I think I’ve gotten lost. My backpack is stuffed with papers and I can’t find the syllabus I was handed just last week. I can no longer pay attention in class. I can no longer spend hours in my room, thinking. In fact, I can barely form coherent thoughts anymore. The only time I have any sort of worthwhile ideas is if I speak them aloud to someone, or write them down, to myself, conversationally.
A tornado blew through my brain at some point in the past two years, and I don’t think I’ve gotten all of the pieces back in place, yet (if I’ve even begun to at all).