Why Do I Love Cleaning So Much When It Makes Me Feel Sick?
Cleaning kills me. Every time. And I keep running head-first into it, like it’s a wall and I’m a dog who doesn’t understand freshly-waxed floors.
I should say that I’m not talking about the everyday cleaning we all do. You know, the endless cycle of doing the dishes. Or vacuuming the rug. Or ignoring the warning on the Q-Tip box and using one to scrape out your earwax anyway. Those are things you just gotta do and they really don’t take all that long.
I’m talking about one of those deep cleans where you move the TV out of the way and unplug all of the wires and you clean the floor and the cabinet and you clean each piece of electronics individually before putting it all back.
It’s the type of cleaning where you start at 9am on a normal damn Saturday because you have no other plans, and you work at it all day, and when you finally give up for the day your place is in more disarray than when you first moved in and you were king of your very own U-Haul box empire.
The type of cleaning where you stop 3 times to browse Pinterest or the IKEA website because no matter how much you move it around, your furniture doesn’t quite fit. Maybe there’s a Flürgg on sale.
That kind of cleaning.
I love it and I hate it.
I hate it because it always … always … makes me feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. And not a small, modern, pedestrian-friendly truck, either. A terrible old truck made of solid steel with one of those metal bars on the front to protect the engine when it inevitably hits a large four-legged woodland beast.
Getting hit by the metaphorical cleaning truck means I will always get a headache. That’s a certainty. I will usually lose steam and feel like every bit of life-force has been sucked right out of me somewhere around the 3–4 hour mark. So when I start a cleaning day, I will push to get as much done as fast as I can before I’ll need to go lie down and be spoon-fed soup.
In fact, I’m writing this right now, from bed, after having “cleaned” for a few hours. My hallway is full of junk, and the bedroom looks like a bomb went off, but the good news is that those damn dust bunnies who’ve been living rent-free under my bed have been relocated to the vacuum canister! Rejoice!
As for the why this makes me sick, well, I’m not sure. I think it’s the dust, the spinning, or both. The dust being stirred up is an obvious potential cause, but that it might be dust always confused me. I don’t have allergies and dust never bothered me in any other capacity.
It’s the spinning, though, that‘s easy to forget about. Cleaning involves moving little stuff around and when you move stuff you spin your head around a lot and walk back and forth and generally do everything you shouldn’t do if you’re prone to dizziness like I am. And I rarely wear my glasses when I clean as well, so that doesn’t help.
Yes, the rumours are true — I’m a genius.
I should stop doing this to myself. I should hire a cleaning service. Or do a little at a time. And yet super-deep cleaning is one of the few activities that I keep doing knowing that it’ll make me feel terrible afterwards. Probably because the benefits are substantial.
Cleaning makes you feel in control. It makes you feel like you’re getting your shit together. It focuses your mind on a task, and for someone whose thoughts spin out of control constantly, it’s a nice change. I’m not thinking about where I’m going to live next year or if my career is heading in the right direction or who I should murder next when I’m scrubbing the floorboards.
I’m just thinking, out out, damn spot!
I call these habits cookie habits. (At least, I do as of one sentence ago.) Cookies are delicious and wonderful things, as we all know. But eat a whole bag and you will want to die. Too much of a good thing, etc. Deep cleaning is that. Exercising is that. Walking is that.
Maybe everything is that!
Woah. It isn’t just the cleaning that’s deep today.
Anyway, deep cleaning is special because it’s really hard to do it “one cookie at a time.” You gotta keep going until it’s done. You gotta eat the whole bag of cookies if you want an organized closet.
(Note: I just stopped writing and went to the kitchen and got a cookie.)
*Said with cookies in mouth* Mow, mat mas ah sain?
Right, maybe I should find a way to clean a little bit at a time. Or maybe we should live in dirt. Outdoors is dirt and we all like being out there.
I don’t know. In the meantime, I’m gonna keep doing my cleaning, feeling terrible, lying down, eating soup, then a cookie, then a few hours later revelling in my hard work and sacrifice.
I’m not sure what my point is here. Something about being human and that involves balance and every good comes with some level of bad. So, hey, I guess if you’re a smoker, light ’em up, ’cause who am I to judge!
And lastly, because this is a post about cleaning in 2019 I feel like I can’t end without saying something about Marie Kondo. So, um, I used to live in a … condo in a neighbourhood called Ville-Marie … and it didn’t bring me joy so I sold it.
That counts, right?
