This is a wholly personal, largely confessional post. I’m telling on myself, though most people who know me will not be surprised.
From time to time you see these things online, which stem from old conversational gambits and party games. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be and would you? There’s utility in these kinds of challenges. You don’t necessarily have to respond openly, but it might prompt you to do a little introspection, and that seems ever in short supply. Do an inventory, if you will. What loose ends are dangling that you might want to tend to.
After decades of playing that game, I’ve come to the conclusion that for the most part, I wouldn’t change much. I’m too aware of how all the things that comprise Me are so intertwined that deleting or changing one might cascade through the rest and I’d come out so different I wouldn’t know myself anymore. That’s a bit dramatic, perhaps, but not as ridiculous as it may sound at first blush. So one has to ask what would you change that would be worth that risk.
I hate to clean.
My entire life I have had this annoying aversion to cleaning things. A very childish attitude, but one that still attends my daily choices. It’s as if some part of me is saying “I cleaned that once, it should stay clean.” For the most part, I manage to clean things anyway, but once in a while I look around and say “Yeesh, what a mess” and I know I have to clean. Usually, “cleaning” to me is a surface thing. As long as you can’t see the mess, it’s fine. But we all know that surface mess usually rests upon a deep foundation of underlying mess that requires attention, and I hate it.
I envy people who can take pleasure in the process, or at least manage not to mind it. I can trick myself into it, but I can never find joy in the doing.
Which results in explosions of major cleaning at long intervals. I get so tired of the mess that I do a top to bottom, major overhaul, scrubbed from stem to stern, which I tackle as a kind of penance, loathing it even as I’m feeling a touch of redemptive self-righteousness while engaging the chaos. I hear the voices of past adults telling me “well, if you just kept up with it, it wouldn’t get this bad.” I am brilliant at finding myriad excuses not to “keep up with it.”
As a child, I recall my parents and my grandmother trying to school me in Being Neat. From time to time they would organize my toys. They would finish and point it out to me that if I put a toy back when I was done playing with it, then it would stay neat. And I would agree. And by the next day, the toys were all over the place, all order destroyed. After all, being “in their place” was never what toys were for. But that didn’t matter. I just found it impossible to maintain the presence of mind to follow through.
They say that disorder and chaos are signs of high intelligence and creativity. Maybe. But honestly, if there were ever one characteristic of mine that I would love to change, it is that aversion to cleaning. I wouldn’t even need to love it, just find it a congenial thing to do regularly, and not have this deep, generally unacknowledged dislike of the actual doing. I do enjoy cleanliness, neatness, orderliness. I do. I just hate the required work.
That one I think would be worth the risk that other aspects of myself might be altered if corrected.
There’s reason for this contemplation, which I will tell you all about later.
Thank you for your attention.