Did a mass clean in my apartment for the first time in 5 yrs

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During the last two days, I had one of those "I had enough!" moments when it comes to mess and clutter. Being a aspie, my packrat tendencies run quite high. So I started a two-day cleaning project, where I sorted out useless clutter that accumulated over the last five years: old newspapers, brochures, plastic junk from years ago, souvenir bags, folders from past job interviews, etc. I ended up collecting four big bags of trash that I knew I wanted to throw out. Of course, whatever I wanted to keep, I kept. There is a fifth bag sitting in a corner, but it has to go to a shredding service, because it has old bank statements in it. It was a long, arduous project, but I finished it.

The apartment now looks almost as empty as the day I moved it, excluding the furniture. And I gotta tell you: it feels pretty good. I'm beginning to understand why my parents got so much enjoyment out of cleaning. Of course, unlike myself, they didn't sort out trash from treasure, especially little things that my aspie mind loved. They ran through my room like US Marines entering an enemy base, sweeping away everything out in the open that doesn't look valuable. I lost count how many of my drawings, sentimental trinkets, mementos, and even small toys ended up in the trash that way. I lost count of how many tears I cried when my parents barged into my room to "clean". Being a kid, I wanted to please my parents (either that or be punished), but I also wasn't willing to sacrifice my treasures for their cleaning addiction.

Now that I used the word "addiction", I'll add one more thing: seeing an emptier-than-before apartment gave me somewhat of a high. I'm wondering at this point if the high my parents got from seeing a clean home was so great, that they were willing to destroy my treasures for it (that I know they saw as just trash). Thoughts?

It must be refreshing!

I'm in the middle of moving between apartments. The cleaning is happening as part of the process. Already taken out several bags of trash, and made a pile for donation.

Isn't it funny how you can get such opposites coming from the same family? Practically my whole family are clean freaks. I lived with my sister for a while a few years back and shes so obsessive that we fell out over things like me moving ornaments even though I doubt they were moved more than a few millimetres out of place.

Me, I'm mostly tidy, but only through repeatedly letting it become a mess and having big tidy ups and finding the priority I assigned to keep things tidy becoming greater and greater.

I think a problem I have when I'm trying to tidy up is that I don't seem to be able to easily categorise what it is I'm picking up. Whether its a piece of plastic, or clothing, or something else I need, I literally have to spend ten seconds per item just trying to decide whether something is useful or not. Sometimes I just stare blankly at an item and can't even get my brain to work at all.

Systems and rules just help no end I think. Having specific places for things helps too. We just have to be able to tidy with doing an absolute minimum of thinking, and that means systems and routines so we can do things on autopilot.

I have some nice routines/systems that help me keep things tidy right now.

Like for example, a routine I have for keeping on top of my washing. The way I do it, I have a clothes rack of the type you'd get in a clothes shop in my kitchen with loads of hangers. When things come out of the washing machine, I put t-shirts on a coathanger, put them on the clothes rack. When theyre all dry, I use my clothes steamer to iron clothes when they're on the coathanger, then transfer them straight to my wardrobe. It uses an absolute minimum of thinking.

That reminds me, I'm going to have to go back to my father's place one of these days to go through all of my old stuff. I have at least a dozen large rubbermaid containers sitting under the stairs, and at least 75% of it is just crap that I've been having a hard time sorting through and throwing away. I used to be somewhat of a hoarder, and when I moved in with my friend's family, part of the reason I did it was to "escape" my hoard.

I have been having a clutter clean out too.

Now with most of the rubbish out of the way I can find room to store and sort my arts and crafts collections consisting of 113 Cross stitching and tapestry kits, threads, aida, 6 years of magazines with charts, cross stitching books, art of crochet collection, sew and stitch collection, big and little knits collection, various other books (parapsychology, fitness, nutrition, drawing, painting, mythology etc), paint by number kits, sequin art kits, scraper foil art kits, art pens, pencils, sketching supplies, acrylic and waterpaints, clay and modelling tools, jigsaw puzzles and so on.

It will take time. I have an entire walk in cupboard full of supply materials and books in my collection.

I need to clean my room, it is disgusting, I live in squalor, but instead of cleaning my room, I will go visit my parents this weekend and eat lots of food.

I get kind of overwhelmed trying to find a place to start when I begin big cleaning projects, so I made a cleaning schedule, thinking it would be easier to just clean a little everyday. But my mom would "dust the baseboards" on "polish the cabinets" day and the schedule got shredded.

I moved out of my mom's house before I moved back in, and consequentially lost my bedroom. I only have a closet now, so no room for weird collections, but in my bedroom I kept dead cicadas in a jewelery box, and my mom seemed pretty happy when the dog ate them. lol

Well, this thread seems to be going on a tangent a little. What I was getting at is people getting an emotional high from seeing clean, empty-looking home. It really seems like that's exactly how my parents felt. Giving yourself that high is fine when you live alone or with a like-minded partner or roommate. But there will be problems when there's a power differential, like between parents and children, or with a really bossy roommate. The more powerful member(s) of the household will always impose their values onto the less powerful one(s). And when the more powerful people are the ones who get an emotional high from cleanliness, it's pretty much a given that drawings, trinkets, and little treasures will find their way into trash.

So my question is, just how much do people crave that emotional high? Enough to throw away things other people consider valuable?

I think I did a little, I had reasons for the few major cleans I did and realising dreams coming true can cause a little rush I think.

It works both ways. Somebody might get an emotional high from living in a clean home, enough to where they would throw away something that another person there considered to be important, but the person holding on to all that stuff also gets an emotional high from having it, enough to where they would hold on to something that another person there would consider trash. So, I suppose the person with the say so about how the house is going to be would be the one who gets to get their emotional high.

I grew up in a house full of hoarder types. I hated all that crap around, and not being able to have people over, and nothing ever being clean. I'd try and clean but get in trouble for it because they wanted to keep crap, like 10 year old newspapers and unopened junk mail, etc. So, I grew up into one of those people who doesn't keep anything they don't have to like that, and I keep all important papers in the file box. My mother on the other hand, had boxes and boxes and drawers and bags full of just crap. All kinds of crap.

She died recently and we have almost finished bringing all her crap over here to my house. Now, I have to go through it all to see if there is anything important in there and throw out most of it. At the moment, my house looks like something from "Hoarding, Buried Alive" and it's driving me insane!

I've never let my kids keep a bunch of crap that they didn't need like old papers and stuff, except for what would fit in a container or drawer I gave them just for that. They had to learn to pick and choose between what they really wanted to keep and what they could do without. I do think that parents should compromise with their kids on something like that. Not everybody is sentemental and feels the same way about objects but those of us who aren't need to understand that some people are sentemental about them and we should compromise with them. That doesn't mean that I think we should give them carte blanche to turn their room into a landfill, which some people would do if allowed to, but I think teaching them the sorting skills they need is a good thing.

I think your parents should have given you a container with a lid and told you to put the things you absolutely had to keep in that and they wouldn't touch it, as long as you didn't put something like food or something that could decay into it, and when it was full and you had something else to go in it, you would have had to go through the stuff and choose something of similar size to get rid of and replace.

For me, it's more than an "emotional high" to have a clean house. When my house is trashed, or piled up like it is now, I get major depression and just can't function. Especially when it's things I can't get rid of like when my oldest son moved in in December, brought all his furniture and bags and boxes of crap and put them now just in the diningroom I gave him, but all over the place, and then moved out and left them here for me to keep. Things have been going steadily downhill for me ever since then. Environment has a huge impact on people's mindset and emotions and being in a very chaotic or messy environment can completely disable some people, so it's more than just a nice emotional high because it's clean. For me, I still feel that way even if the mess is behind a closed door in a room I don't go in, because I know it's there.

I also think that whoever owns the house as a right to decide how it's kept, but should make compromises. Would you have been ok with it if your parents had given you a container for the things you thought of as treasure and then you kept the rest of your room clean?

Congratulations! It's hard but it does feel good!

Lol. They probably wouldn't stand for that, either. If anything, they'd probably try to clean the container too. Even homework worksheets (that didn't look like it) ended up in a garbage many a time; then I got punished for getting a zero on that assignment. Or it would be a Gladware and not a Rubbermaid, if you catch my drift. So anything that was flat enough to fit inside books, I hid there. (I knew that my parents had the same "treasures" view toward books, and hiding things there helped me remember book titles that most kids didn't even know existed.) Other than that, I just lost hours of sleep time, worrying about things getting thrown out, or crying myself to sleep when it already happened. Recovering things wasn't usually an option, since my parents usually took them straight to the condo building's dumpster, rather than putting them in the garbage at home.

Now that I think about it, all this might have been driven by being kindness-minded, which many aspie kids are (until they get bitter and jaded), and attaching feelings to objects. As in, taking a broken toy train car, an unusual-looking used pen, a stuffed dog ear I found on the street -- all of which adults would throw as garbage, and treat it like the treasure it once was (to adults) and still deserves to be. I suppose it gave me an emotional high to be the only kind person in that object's life. I even thought of myself as the Kindest Child Ever Lived (a title I gave myself). Drawings, I kept for a different purpose. They were my own works that I loved, but could easily recreate. It was just a hassle to keep doing it over and over as they got thrown away.

Even today, I find myself holding on to "treasures", like a plastic cup with a Carnival logo from a cruise where a girl made out with me, in a deck chair at night, underneath the ship's funnel . And I can't help but revel in the fact that the only person who will throw it away is either myself or a burglar. Basically, pretty much the same reason kids hold on to treasures (which was severely restricted for me back then), only with an adult motive behind it. An 18th-century rabbi once said: "If a child is not allowed to play when he is little, he will play after he grows up." Heck, when I was little, my dream was to play around in the city dump and be able to take home "treasures"; and I lived it out by filling my apartment with clutter (until recently).

I don't know if they get an emotional high. Or if they do its connected with the fact they also get an emotional low when things are a mess.

Something I've noticed about myself is that there's this feeling I get when my flat is cluttered that's barely there. It's something I've noticed not because it's so obvious but because I've had tidy periods and I've had untidy periods of my life and the contrast between the two states has become something noticeable.

It's like I genuinely do find that having an untidy home infects the rest of my well being. It's really subtle but the older I get, and the more tidy periods I experience, the more I realise the truth of it.

It's just this low level depression/ cluttered feeling that I experience from an unfinished job. Its like I can't see past my untidy home into considering other essential life tasks that need to be thought of. Every time my mind drifts off to some interest I forget about it but every time my mind comes back to earth it's still there and I recognise that now. Cleaning my home opens my mind to other things I need to do. The moment I have a clean home my mind moves past it and i just feel so much freer.

Maybe the people in our lives that are clean freaks are just more aware of how bad it makes them feel to have an untidy home. They're more in touch with their own instincts than we are. They're more aware of the bad feeling they experience when things are a mess.

So maybe that's where some of their ruthlessness comes from. Not from experiencing a high at tidying, which of course is something we'd concentrate on because we don't have tidy homes as often, but from receiving a low when it's a mess. They really do connect morality with being clean right? Maybe it's just because feeling bad comes with being untidy, and obviously eliminating that bad feeling/ feeling of being immoral is all important, hence being clean becoming more important than caring about someone's feelings.

I think they experience the same drives as we do but we just apply them differently. We don't get obsessed over cleaning cause we see other things as being more worthy. I would rather obsess over an interest than wasting it on cleaning. It's just somewhere I forgot that my sub conscious self really is affected by an untidy environment. So these days I do attach importance to being tidy, I just don't make it an overriding thing but rather something that's nice and something which improves my quality of life. Basically the same point as my clean freak family but without the obsessive/ controlling way of seeing it. I'm above it but I get the benefit of it at the same time.

I don't attach any morality to being clean, but it's a major factor in my moods.

Aspie1, isn't it strange how we both grew up with completely different feelings towards the state of our homes than we were raised with? I wonder if we each developed what we did because of needing control and not having it as a child. I'm a big control freak and I think if my house was neat like yours when I grew up and I wasn't allowed to be normally messy then I would probably have turned into the biggest slob ever now.

I just did a major cleanup last weekend and it felt wonderful. The cleaner my place is, the less stressed I feel.