The Dirty Life-Toilet Mentality
What happens when DIRTY is no longer DEFAULT
Do you know what Credit Card debt, missed deadlines at office, procrastination to a glorious level, relationship issues, bad health, overdue bills…and DIRTY TOILETS, have in common? For a long time, I didn’t either…but read on and maybe you will be able to make sense of it all.
I have this habit of letting my toilet get really dirty before I clean it. And I will spend hours in the bathroom scrubbing and brushing on my hands and knees to clean this. And I will make sure that it is spic and span. Of cos, you know how it is, specially cleaning the grout dirt that had got wedged in nicely. It takes considerable more time and effort to clean this but I do it. And I will do it again once it is dirty. And please don’t get me wrong, I am very concerned about my personal hygiene. I never leave the house without a shower, Deo and wear clean clothes. So, this is not a reflection of my shabby and disgusting personal behaviour.
The pragmatic thing to do is of cos to clean the bathroom as a habit. Either everyday or every week. so that I will not have to kill myself doing this every 1 month. But there is satisfaction that I get when I see the dirt being cleaned and the Brown turning into White and the whole place starts smelling so much better again. I feel this sense of achievement, that I made this dirty thing clean and nice. I feel accomplished that I did something and I can wait for another month to feel this way again. This feeling of One-off accomplishment seems to be better than the having a clean bathroom everyday somehow.
I was also thinking that this is the pattern in my life. I find myself letting things get really dirty or bad until I actually do something about it. It is not that I can’t do anything about it before, or that I lacked the skill, knowledge or ability to do something about it. I see what is going on, I see the White fading away and brown appearing, I see the grout turning black, I see the stains in the sink and on the wall. But I choose to just let it be. its as if I feel that I don’t deserve to be in a clean bathroom. Maybe growing up I didn’t have a clean bathroom so I am comfortable with it…until I become uncomfortable with it.
Things in my childhood might have had some bad times which my parents didn’t really care to ‘clean up’ until it got really dirty. They did not communicate on a daily basis, they did not do the daily cleaning needed to keep the White turning Brown and the sink from getting stained in their marriage and relationship. They just let things get really bad and messed up before they even acknowledged that something was wrong. After some point in life, their problems became my problems and I had to ‘clean them up’. I had to step in and become the hero, the saviour. My father lost his job when I was 15. I have been taking care of my family since I was 19. He just stopped making an effort and gave up. It was me who had to take this on and clean up. Why did my Father just give up? His was the only income my family had and we were living off of handouts from my mother’s side of the family. Why did he not care about what was happening. Maybe he did, which is why he became an alcoholic. Because he could not consciously process or live with himself for what he had done or not done to be precise.
In my family, I was the ‘clean-up’ guy, and there was always something to clean up, for a long period of my Adolescent and adult life. So this became my identity, things are messy and dirty, so I clean up, or at least try. But eventually, things got better. I had a Good job and started making decent Money. It was not always a struggle any more, and for the most part, there was NO Special Mess to clean up, it was just normal day-to-day stuff that we all go through.
When ‘Dirty’ is the default state, cleaning also becomes a ‘default’ course of action. And the ‘cleaner’ derives satisfaction from seeing that their efforts have made a difference to the state of affairs i.e turning the dirty in to the clean. This was my motivation, my purpose and maybe even my ‘default reason to exist’. So if the world is not giving me messes to clean up, it makes sense that I create my own messes, just so that I can feel good by cleaning them up. But the issue is, when this mentality extends to physical, mental and emotional states of being. First there is panic and then ‘some’ action and then, because there is now too many ‘self-created’ messes, the brain goes in to a very familiar ‘dirty’ state where it can sit happily looking at everything that is messed up, become really messed up, before even paying attention to it, let alone ‘clean it up’.
So, THIS is what Credit Card debt, missed deadlines at office, procrastination to a glorious level, relationship issues, bad health, overdue bills…and DIRTY TOILETS, have in common. They all come from a place where ‘DIRTY’ is the ‘DEFAULT’ mode of existence. Where messy and chaotic is not only tolerated, but craved for, in order to feel alive and derive meaning and purpose from. Of course, this is absolute madness and a perfectly good way to waste one’s life. Because the stress, anxiety and physical ailments that accompany this ‘dirty attitude’ takes a toll on you as the years roll by, and at 40, its clearly showing in me.
But the Good thing about all this, is the fact that we now know where this kind if behaviour comes from. If its not consistent with who we are and what we know we are capable of doing and achieving, then most probably there is some kind of underlaying ‘survival mentality’ that we are unable to shake, that is causing it. Most of the time, we trust these instincts so much because it got us through tough times and to our minds, it just does not make sense to abandon a ‘survival instinct’. But as soon as we realise what is going on, we are able to give our brains some context as to what is happening right now vs what happened all that time ago. We don’t need to delete all such instincts, we just need to make sure that it does not sabotage our lives when things are relatively less chaotic, less messy…and of course, must less Dirty.
Happy Cleaning folks!
