“maybe you should be more organized”
no
A few days ago, my boyfriend Alex broke a piece of pottery I had spent a few weeks working on. It was a beautiful piece that meant a lot to me, and so you can imagine how sad I felt when I saw this:
I asked Alex how he broke it.
“Well, I was moving my kettlebell, and I just put it on the ground, and then I heard a crack.”
I was pretty pissed off at Alex, so I probably said something somewhat passive aggressive. Neither of us remember what I said.
At some point Alex said this: “I feel like you want me to apologize, but I don’t want to apologize right now. Never in my life before did I have to pay attention to where on the floor I was putting my kettlebell to make sure I didn’t accidentally smash a ceramic surrounded by clothes of a similar color. Maybe you should be more organized, Valerie.”1
Why wouldn’t he just give me a full apology? Sure, my room was messy, but he should’ve just made sure there was nothing on the floor beforehand. And yeah, I never held myself to the same standards, which is why I accidentally stepped on a bag of potato chips a few days before, but it was my room. He was my guest, and he broke something.
I felt tempted to stay in this mentality, but then I realized that would be a really fucking misleading mentality to write a Substack post about, so I decided to tell you the truth instead. The truth is, I am a complete fucking slob. Like, can’t see the floor of my room slob. Like, so messy that I put a bunch of packages of chips on the floor and then accidentally tripped over them a few days later. Like, this amount of slob:
So yeah, this is a post about how maybe Alex has a point, and maybe I actually should be more organized after all lol.
Growing up, being clean always felt like something I was forced to do, so of course I never did it out of my own will. I went to boarding school, and we would have “room inspections” where people would randomly stop by your room. If it was too messy, you’d get a strike. Three strikes and you’d have to stay in for a few nights. I didn’t want to clean my room, so I’d lock my door whenever I heard that the room inspectors were coming, and they couldn’t inspect my room.
When I came home on breaks, my dad would yell at me to clean my room. On some days, he’d tell me I had to clean my room, and I wasn’t allowed to do anything else until he deemed my room to be clean enough. “You never clean things on your own!” he said angrily, and I’d think to myself, You don’t clean your own shit because your word doesn’t mean anything. This must mean being clean literally doesn’t matter!
Often in order to change, I have to find my current way of being unsustainable. This means I face the true costs of the status quo and realize they are far too high. That’s why there are stories of people who quit smoking when they realize they want to be alive to walk their kids down the aisle: they discover a hidden cost to their actions that’s unbearably high.
In my case, the cost of being messy wasn’t high enough. Sure, my dad would yell at me about how embarrassing it was that a Harvard kid could be so messy, but him yelling at me didn’t make me any more motivated to clean my room. Sure, sometimes I couldn’t find my retainers or sometimes I’d spend extra time looking for my keys on occasion, but that was a cost I was willing to pay. It took Alex breaking something I cared about before I discovered a price that felt too high: turns out if all your shit is on the floor, then you can’t see the ground, so the people you love might break things that you can’t replace.
Alex did end up apologizing for his share of the responsibility, but that’s not relevant to the main point I’m trying to make.
Cool takeaway! I've been fairly disorganized and the costs to being messy - a few extra minutes to find something or, worse, not finding it - produce a lot of extra stress, which downstream inconveniences people I care about. Being organized not for yourself, but for someone you care about and to derisk bad things happening, feels like a worthwhile motivation.