Skitty-san
ArikaiHart
I think caring about the mess is healthier than ignoring it in a resigned manner.
I feel like my problem is mostly that I go through phases. I'll keep up with my cleaning for a week or two at most and then resign and live in filth until it gets so bad I contemplate suicide and have an anxiety attack and force myself to clean. My mom was like that too. We'd just live in filth until my mom would wake and bake and have a Cleaning Day. We hated Cleaning Days because they always came out of nowhere and we always had to cancel whatever we had planned for that day and essentially be strapped to whatever chore we were assigned. I've always had a negative relationship with cleaning but I've also always had a negative relationship with the mess. I never get as bad as we were as kids living with our mom where we'd let dirty dishes pile up for two weeks and I'd have to deal with cleaning rotten meat (I was always on dish duty for some reason fml) and I just want to not hate cleaning. From the bottom of my heart I want to. It's tough. I'm getting better but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's one of my famous two-weeks-on-average phases.Same, my apartment will be tidy and neat and clean for a few weeks and then it will just descend into chaos. It's definitely partially school-related with me, but even when I work a regular office job I have weeks where I do dishes as-needed and s**t grows in my fridge. I'll frantically clean whenever anyone comes over and still feel like my apartment is a disaster. Growing up my house was always clean, though frequently untidy, and my mum came from a neurotically tidy and clean family so the house was never clean enough for her. I did not inherit the natural urge to keep things clean, but I learned to really value cleanliness, which makes a pretty bad mix imho.
But for what it's worth, I have never felt like your apartment is dirty. A little messy, at worse, but only in a I-am-not-a-cleaning-robot-and-use-this-space way. If cleanliness really is a form of manners then you've got the politest apartment out of all my friends.
