Losing it

The cruelest thing about mental illness is the loss of one's true self. Trauma such as sexual abuse can have the same effect: you mask or hide your true self for survival.

At one time, long, long ago, I was a cheerful, outgoing, talkative little girl. I was bright enough that the school considered bumping me over 3rd grade. I wish they had: I had social issues even among my own grade-mates. Jumping a year wouldn't have hurt me that way at all. And I was so all-consumingly bored by everything but math — and that just stomped me into the ground.  So all that boredom squashed me a bit. Don't stand out. Eventually I took only the classes I knew I could get As in so as to please my parents.

But the effects of the abuse hit me at puberty and I became shy and awkward and tended to slouch and mumble by about the age of 10 or 11. My parents couldn't even get me to take the check up to the restaurant cashier and pay it; I wouldn't go without my brother. Thus began my social phobia and ended my fearlessness.

I wasn't supposed to use the words or the knowledge that I had from reading or my gifted class — that was showing off and unacceptable. (My parents probably didn't understand everything I said by the time I was 12.) But my brother could show off any physical prowess he had. That was okay.

I wasn't supposed to correct adults, even if the teacher was teaching something wrong or an adult went back on what they said. Squash. I lost my vocabulary. I lost a lot of my brightness; I became dull.

At least I kept my room clean and tidy. Very. I liked clean and tidy and organized, even when I became a teen. No tossing clothes around and being a general slob.

I was a bit untidy in my mid-20s, when i shared a house with two guy friends. I was so miserable, still borderline suicidal (still considered it an option if I couldn't handle things), no boyfriend so I felt ugly and unloved. I began keeping my clothing in a nest around me in my bed — a queen mattress on the floor. I liked my weird-shaped room in the attic but I froze in the winter. That might have sparked the nesting.

When my best friend Steve and I shared an apartment together, I kept my space and the house clean and tidy in partnership with Steve. He, too, has always been neat and tidy, so it was easy to be that way. And I was that way with Marlys when I roomed with her. I wasn't too untidy when I moved in with Thom, but he kept all his computer stuff in a mess, so it began.

When I moved into my own house in my early 30s, at first I was very tidy. That's what I like. I loved sweeping the old oak floors. I loved that house. But then I hit a major depression, so bad that I even took two leaves of absence from work for mental health reasons. My house became the Pit of Chaos. My Mom and her second husband came and helped me clean up once. I tried, but was only able to keep parts of my home clean. Never the kitchen. I stopped cooking much at all. This continued to the coast and was the worst ever in my little apartment at the end of my life on the coast; I never even unpacked for the year I lived there. I felt lost and hopeless and terrified, with a wide-open future in front of me. Being alone in my apartment where I live now, I achieved only moderate tidiness, but it was better than nothing. I was still over-stressed. I had lost the tidy, organized, happy me.

When I moved back to Oregon to take care of Mom, I wanted to keep the tidiness up to her standards. It was bad enough she had to deal with cancer; i wasn't going to make her uncomfortable with clutter. So I kept things up fairly well. Mom had a cleaner come every other week, which was very helpful because that was beyond me. I didn't cook much for us. But I kept the clutter to a minimum and mom was comfortable in her beloved home with the brand-new kitchen until she died.

Return to Houston: my home hasn't been this bad since those bad days in Seattle in the house I loved. There are papers, mostly mail and discarded empty envelopes, all over the floor. No single surface is clean and tidy. My clothes are piled in bins and on the white wire shelf in the closet. No, I don't have a chest of drawers, or enough shelves in the book shelf. I don't use the desk because it has the TV and more stuff on top of it.

I hate this, hate this, hate this. I want clean and tidy. I want my life to be simple and easy to maintain. The times when I've achieved that, even briefly, I have experienced peacefulness and happiness. To say that this mess is contributing to my depression and anxiety is an understatement. But I don't have the energy to pick up. I'm behind on my bills, on the estate's bills. I don't even know where they all are. I am unhappy in part because my home is a mess, and when I'm this unhappy I cannot keep it clean and organized: it's a Catch-22.

I need help. Don't seem able to provide it to myself; that's something else I've lost.

Are any of those things even findable?