Spring Cleaning in September
Spring cleaning came late this year.
I cleaned my brain from top to bottom. I polished my amygdala, decluttered and reorganized my priorities, floors swept, rafters de-cobwebbed.
I donated more clothes than I knew I had. I threw out half my makeup, most of it was expired anyway. I got rid of books I bought in middle school when I had nothing but time to read and novels I bought in high school that were warped and creased after being begrudgingly annotated and analyzed. I forgot the stories most of those books told a long time ago, some I never even finished, but they’re always the hardest for me to part with.
I left college. I liked the classes but hated the town. I got tired of being unhappy and knowing it but not doing anything about it. I applied to a different university and got in but then decided not to go. I realized that it was okay to change my mind a lot. It didn’t mean that I was lost or unreliable.
I moved out of my first apartment and moved home. I ripped posters from walls and threw away photos of memories half-made. I scrubbed the grout in my shower until the splatters of pink and purple hair dye faded back to pristine egg-shell. I still got charged $105 in redecorating fees because I left a tube of toothpaste and an expired box of Monistat in my bathroom drawer.
Now that I’m back in my hometown for a while I’m finding myself driving the same roads I would drive in high school to sneak away and smoke weed or go to dinner at my best friend’s house. My best friend still lives in the same house, but I’m allowed to smoke at home now.
Moving back home after college was always something that scared me. I saw it as a failure, as not being enough of a person to stand on my own two feet. But I change my mind a lot more now, and my therapist told me she thinks I’ve gotten better at “existing peacefully and purposefully in times of turmoil or transition.” I look to the future more now, too, because she tells me you can’t make progress in the past. I’ve always been a nostalgic person, though. Living through photos or journal entries from years past, both mine and other peoples’, or actively taking photos and writing to feel the nostalgia of future-me. A whiplash-inducing back and forth between the past and the future, probably culminating in my current desire to focus on the now. And it’s up to me to keep the now worth enjoying.
It’s okay to change my mind. It’s okay to realize you’re unhappy and to do something about it. And it’s okay that I’m spring cleaning in September.
