Finding enthalpy

In therapy and in my friend-talk unofficial therapy, one of my big crisis points is tidiness.

I am a slob. I know I am a slob. It’s physically evident, and therefore very difficult to deny.

My specific disorder is untidiness. I do not leave dishes out or food bits laying around, but all the beads, hoola hoops, itinerant papers, purses, candles, toy cameras, and my endless stream of flotsam is strewn about like a cyclone around me. I’ve literally always been this way. I can’t remember a time in my life where I wasn’t supposed to clean something up.

In therapy, I’ve worked on recognizing this as a behavior and not an innate flaw of my being. Being a slob not a definition of who I am as a person.

My best friend has watched me mentally fight the wave of untidy, trying to keep my head above the papers and toys. She said to me, “Instead of fighting it, maybe you need to accept this as part of how you live.” Brilliant words. Instead of hating myself at being a miserable failure at life because I can’t move the perfume bottle from the coffee table to the bathroom vanity, accept that in my mind the place for the perfume bottle may be the coffee table.

I fight the untidy self-loathing, and feel like I am winning, until a little someone in my life reminds me … I don’t live alone.

My roommate, my best friend, my husband. He reminds me, “But I don’t want to live like this.”

Notice I said “roommate” first and “husband” last. I never lose sight of my husband, but I forget that he has to live as my roommate amidst the swirling tidal pool of my works in progress. And he doesn’t like it. When I met my husband, he was a tidy bachelor with a few belongings and a penchant for video games. Now he’s caught up in my entropy, and he’s gotten some untidy habits as well.

Lately, though, I’ve seen him breaking free of me. He keeps his clothes neater in their drawers and in his closet. He has organized a motorcycle gear area. He has a desk/office I’m essentially not allowed to touch.

He’s climbing out of me. I watch him fold his t-shirts and open a drawer to put them away, and I feel a skeezy red neon sign above my head weakly flickering “LOSER.” I’m back in the judgment. If Matthew can be tidy, then I am a failure at life because I struggle to be tidy.

Matthew just wants a balance between the entropy and a little enthalpy. Isn’t that what some theorists think the universe wants too? Pushing and pulling to find a cosmic balance between entropy and enthalpy? The magnetic influence of Matthew’s tidiness needs a stronger pull to get me into balance. But I’ll try. I’ll try to reverse polarity and find that even space.

I hope. I hope to try. I may be coming to terms with being a slob, but my husband doesn’t want to. I hope I can come to terms with living with my roommate, my spouse and come to terms with my character traits.